


everything we built has fallen into the sea

by statusquo_ergo



Series: tell me something i'll believe [2]
Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Car Accidents, Hospitals, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rehabilitation, Season/Series 05, Slow Burn, Traumatic Brain Injury - TBI
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-04-14 01:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14125356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: Thinking back, the first thing Mike remembers is a snapshot from the night before the accident; he remembers climbing into bed, and he thinks he read for a little while before he turned the lights out.He might be making that part up.





	1. Chapter 1

Mike watches indifferently as the woman beside him uncaps the needle of a small syringe. The stray thought ambles through his mind that there was a time before when he made a point of looking away or closing his eyes tight when doctors put needles in his arm, but he doesn’t seem to mind it anymore; it’s not as though it’ll hurt any less if he can’t see it, and anyway, it doesn’t hurt very much to begin with. Watching his blood pour into the little vial in the woman’s hand, he wonders if she’s taking a lot or a little; he doesn’t know what she needs it for, but she takes it from the same spot every day, so it must be important.

“Okay, great,” she says, dropping the used needle into a plastic bag and pressing gauze to the pinprick below the crook of Mike’s right elbow. “All done.”

Her shirt is covered with a repeating pattern of green octopuses with big eyes and big blue whales with dopey smiles on their faces and water spouting up from their blowholes.

Mike scratches his forearm and sniffles.

Sitting in this wheelchair for too long make his back ache.

\---

The shower stall is big enough that it has a wet side and a dry side, even when the water’s turned on, but the plastic seat is just barely in the dry side, so Mike doesn’t have to worry about the soap lather being washed away before he’s finished rubbing it all up and down his arms and legs.

Grabbing onto the metal bar attached to the wall, he pulls himself up to standing, starting to raise his free arm toward the water as he moves toward the spray. He always forgets until it starts to bother him, but his right side is the one where his shoulder hurts when he tries to put his hand up over his head.

The dark stripes on the floor are gritty underneath his bare feet, but the water feels sort of nice on his chest.

“Mike, are you okay?” Rachel asks, her voice a little muted through the curtain. “Do you want me to come in and help?”

No, he doesn’t. He can do this on his own. He can.

“Mike?” she calls again when he doesn’t answer.

“No,” he says. No, I’m fine. No, stay where you are.

“What did you say?”

He raises his chin up. “No,” he says again, a little louder. He thinks so, anyway; he tried.

“Okay,” she says, “but I’m here if you need me.”

I don’t. I can do it.

Turning toward the wall, he grabs the bar with his free hand to switch which one is under the spray, but—oh; oh, no, oh, no. Did he move too fast? Suddenly his head is light, suddenly the room is crooked. He stands on a narrow balance beam suspended between two very tall buildings and he’s about to fall, he’s going to fall, everything is tilted at the wrong angle and no matter how many times he blinks, he can’t make it all set itself right again.

Gripping the metal bar with both hands, he guides himself back to the other side of the stall.

The soap on his legs is beginning to dry.

His ears are full of water.

Sitting perfectly still, he closes his eyes and tries not to throw up.

\---

Rachel sits in a chair beside his bed with a smile on her face that makes Mike want to roll his eyes, except he knows she’s getting sick of him doing that and he isn’t in the mood to sit through another lecture or a snide comment about how hard this is on all of them and she wishes he would give her a little space to be proud of him or whatever. Drawing his knees up to his chest, he instead turns his face away from her, looking around the room at the stuffed animals and shiny balloons that have been there for as long as he can remember.

About half the wall to his left is taken up by a wide window. Taped up next to it, between the frame and the pile of toys in the corner, is a picture Mike recognizes, the paper sleeve of a hardcover book he knows called _Curious George_.

“This is George. He lived in Africa. He was very happy.”

Mike’s mother used to read it to him every night when he was a kid; he wonders who put the picture up on the wall, seeing as how he’s pretty sure his mother is dead. Yeah, in fact, she’s been dead for awhile; for a minute, he tries to remember how it happened, but there’s not much point in pushing himself. If he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.

It’s okay.

Anyway, it’s probably nice that it’s there, and all those animals and balloons and things are kind of nice, too; he knows people are thinking about him, people care he’s in here, it’s just that he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do with all of it. One of the balloons is already starting to deflate, and most of the stuffed animals are pretty cute but one of them is a giraffe with purple fur and huge glass eyes that really creeps him out.

If he hadn’t gotten anything at all, Mike figures he would’ve been disappointed, but the way things are now, he thinks things might be easier if it was all cleared out sometime tomorrow. Maybe he’ll keep one of the stuffed dogs; there’s a little black and white one with bright blue eyes and soft fur that he thinks he likes.

“Here,” Rachel says, reaching for the little table next to his bed. “Do you feel like reading?”

The book she offers him is _The Brothers Karamazov_ , by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A bookmark sticks out from between the pages about half an inch from the front cover; Mike doesn’t remember reading it, doesn’t remember skimming the words or flipping the pages, but he knows how the story starts. Part I, Book I, A Nice Little Family. Chapter I, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. “Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place.”

Mike thinks somebody else picked the book out for him. He doesn’t remember who.

“No,” he says, still looking at the shiny balloons and the creepy giraffe.

“Oh; do you want me to read to you?” Rachel asks, setting the book down in her lap.

Mike stretches his legs out in front of him and slides down the bed until his head comes to rest on a pillow.

“No.”

She might be nodding, or she might be putting the book back on the bedside table, but he closes his eyes and doesn’t see either way.

\---

Thinking back, the first thing Mike remembers is a snapshot, a moment from the night before the accident; he remembers climbing into bed with a vague sense that something was going to happen the next day, although he isn’t sure if he expected it to be a good thing or a bad one. He thinks he read for a little while before he turned the lights out, but he might be making that part up.

Maybe he just won’t tell anybody about any of it.

That’s good enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the risk of spoiling some of Mike’s character development, it’s worth noting that he is not actually having his blood drawn every day; in the moment, however, the act feels so routine to him that he assumes he is.
> 
> Dostoevsky, F. (2002). _The Brothers Karamazov_. (R. Pevear  & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (Original work published 1880)  
> Ray, H. A. (1941). _Curious George_. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
> 
> Feel free to say hi on [tumblr](https://statusquoergo.tumblr.com), and if you want to, check out the [mood board](https://statusquoergo.tumblr.com/post/180401953144/everything-we-built-has-fallen-into-the-sea-mood) for this fic.


	2. Chapter 2

“This too much for you?”

Jason hands Mike an weighted black ball a little bigger than his fist. Mike passes it between his hands, watching the nearly flat arc and making sure not to throw too high.

“It’s fine.”

Nodding, Jason sidesteps to the mouth of the parallel bars as Mike takes his place between them and hands the ball back.

“So let’s start off with both feet on the ground, both eyes open,” Jason says. Looking down at his feet, Mike wonders what the point of this part is; wonders if there was a time he couldn’t stand straight for long, even though just a few minutes ago, he walked all the way here from his room down the hall.

“Head up, Mike,” Jason says. “I know, just hold it for ten seconds.”

Mike glances around the room at the treatment table to his left, the ellipticals to his right. There’s a treadmill behind him somewhere, although he’s never seen anyone use it. Maybe one time. Some old white-haired guy attached to an oxygen tank or something, Mike doesn’t remember recognizing him.

“Alright,” Jason says, turning off the stopwatch just as it begins to trill. “Now this time, keep your head up and close your eyes, and we’ll try for thirty seconds.”

“Does it matter how I stand?”

Sometimes Jason cares about that. Not always, but sometimes.

“Try to distribute your weight equally between both feet,” Jason instructs. “About shoulder-width apart, that’s fine.”

Mike teeters from side to side until he feels about even.

“Okay, eyes closed.”

The stopwatch beeps sharply as Jason starts it.

Mike wonders why his vision doesn’t go completely black when he shut his eyes. The whole left side has sort of a red glow to it, and there’s a whitish spot straight ahead where Jason’s standing; when he moves his eyes under the lids, the colored spots move too, in a jumpy sort of way.

How many seconds is that? Twenty?

One; two; three…

Mike only gets a tiny bit of warning, maybe a second, maybe half, before his head starts hurting like he’s about to fall over. Wait, but— No, the timer hasn’t gone off yet; but hasn’t it been thirty seconds by now? Hasn’t it? Shit— Mike gropes blindly for the closest parallel bar but he isn’t sure how high they are—is it chest level, is it waist? He doesn’t know, he can’t remember how near or far they are, how much he has to reach; the back of his right hand knocks into the wood and stings his knuckles and he winces, opening his eyes and gripping the bar as the world slots back into place, his footing stable and his knees only slightly bent.

_Beep._

“Nineteen seconds,” Jason says. “Nice work, that’s good.”

Mike drops his hand from the bar. “Nineteen seconds?”

“Yeah,” Jason says as he slips the stopwatch into his pocket. “It’s okay, you’re doing great. You remember how long you held it when we first started?”

Of course not. Thanks for the reminder, though, that’s a fun thing to think about.

“No.”

Jason nods, tossing the ball from hand to hand. “The first time we did this, you held it for three seconds.”

Jason tosses the ball a lot faster than Mike did.

“Three seconds?”

“Yeah, so maybe quit beating yourself up over this.”

You know, I would, but “better” isn’t the same as “good enough.”

Mike presses his hands down on the parallel bars and tries to raise himself up off the floor.

“Alright,” Jason coaxes him down, “you wanna get right to the ball, or do you want to get the rest of the balancing stuff out of the way?”

Setting himself back on the ground, toe-to-heel, Mike plants his feet firmly and tries to think. The idea of balancing on one leg fills him with dread, although he isn’t sure why; did he fall last time? Does it hurt his ankle, or the ball of his foot? Or maybe none of that, maybe he just really sucks at it.

“The ball,” he decides. Jason nods, utterly unsurprised.

“Alright,” he says, holding the ball up, “let’s start with both feet on the ground. I’m not gonna throw it very hard, so you just do your best to catch it, okay? You’re not gonna get hurt.”

Obviously not.

Mike is only a little bit nervous.

There’s no need for that, of course; Jason tosses the ball right to his chest, and he doesn’t even have to try for it to land securely in his hands. Mike makes an underhand toss back that Jason has to stoop for, but that’s okay; this exercise is about catching, not throwing. Balance, not hand-eye coordination. Anyway, Jason is a physical therapist, he can handle bending down a little for a stupid ball.

“Good,” Jason says. “Okay, it’s coming at different angles now, alright? First one’s to the left, you can catch it with both hands.”

His eyes a little wide, a little anticipatory, Jason nods, bending his knees, raising the ball in his hand, doing everything he possibly can to warn Mike that he’s about to throw it. Mike tries to lower his center of gravity and keep his eyes on the target; the gentle lob ends up about a foot away from his ear and he scrambles for it, his arms flailing as he grabs the ball out of the air and pulls it to his chest.

“Nice catch,” Jason approves. “Next time try to keep it in a little tighter, okay, and if you drop it, that’s fine, we can do this as many times as we have to. I don’t want you to pull any muscles.”

He waves his hand when Mike scowls.

“Hey, it’s okay. You’re still recovering, you’re doing great. Let’s keep going.”

Mike throws the ball back and makes no effort to quash the bitter resentment that burns in his chest when Jason catches it one-handed.

“Coming in on your left.”

\---

Mike looks warily at Harvey, lounging in the chair beside his bed. He doesn’t seem to be trying to sneak a peak at Mike’s cards, but Mike can’t be sure how close he’s holding them to the vest; Harvey’s had to warn him a few times that he isn’t being careful enough, and Mike isn’t sure whether it’s his depth perception that’s failing him or his dexterity or what, but he’s spending about half his energy trying to make sure he’s keeping his hand secret and it’s really sucking the fun out of this stupid game. Not that the game means anything to begin with; they’re barely even playing for bragging rights.

Harvey flips the jack of clubs into the discard pile to end his turn.

Studying his cards carefully, Mike picks up the jack and lays the three of hearts face down in its place, spreading gin rummy across the overboard table in front of him.

“Are you letting me win?”

Harvey scoops the cards up and begins to shuffle. “Would I do that to you?”

“No.”

Maybe.

Harvey cuts the deck. “Another round?”

Mike picks up the large takeout cup on his side table and swirls a melted bit of milkshake left at the bottom. “I’m done. Do you have any more DVDs?”

“Just _Top Gun_ ,” Harvey says as he wraps the cards up in a rubber band. “How was the shake?”

“Fine.” Mike swirls the cup again. “Good. Why do you keep bringing me milkshakes?”

“Oh,” Harvey says, busying himself with the overnight bag on the floor beside him, even though it doesn’t look to Mike like he’s doing much of anything at all. “When you first got here, the doctors were worried about you gaining back the weight you lost in…in the last month or so, but the hospital food was—you know, hospital food, so I started bringing shakes instead, I figured you’d prefer that over powdered mashed potatoes and lime Jell-O.”

Oh. Okay, that makes sense.

Mike closes his lips around the straw and sucks up the dregs.

“I thought you liked them,” Harvey says. “You drank them all, but—do you not want them anymore?”

Mike holds the empty cup out toward Harvey, who takes it and sets it down on the floor.

“Shouldn’t I be eating more vegetables?”

Harvey smiles, but Mike can’t tell exactly what he means by it.

“I’m sure we can get you some vegetables, if you think that’d be better.”

Mike pulls at the overboard so that the table is positioned over his stomach and rests his arms on top of it.

Harvey clears his throat, sounding like he’s trying to fill the silence. Mike wonders if he’s nervous about anything; there’s nothing to be nervous about, really. Nothing ever happens here.

“Are you practicing your speech exercises?” Harvey asks in a tone like he’d rather be talking about something else.

Yeah, well, he’s not the only one.

Mike doesn’t respond, instead turning his body toward the side table and picking up a sheet of paper with large-print sentences on it that say things like “My pet Roger is white and fluffy and he loves to eat carrots.” As he settles back against his pillows, he hears Harvey sigh, and wonders if he’s done something wrong.

“Mike, you’re doing a lot better, but you’ve gotta keep it up every day,” he says. Mike isn’t sure if he’s sad or disappointed; maybe both. Maybe neither. It’s hard to tell.

“I did them this morning,” Mike says. Harvey nods.

“Good,” he says, crossing his legs and clapping his hands down on his knee. “Good.”

Mike skims the page again; down at the bottom is the sentence, “The puzzle took me so long to put together that I threw it in the garbage,” which Mike thinks is probably not the best thing to put on a list like this.

“They make me feel like I’m five years old,” he mutters, setting the paper down at his side, on top of the covers.

Harvey sighs out through his nose and folds his hands together.

“I know.”

When Mike burrows down under his blanket, tugging it up to his chin, the sheet of speech exercises flutters to the floor at Harvey’s feet. Harvey bends over to pick it up, reading it quickly with an increasingly disgusted scowl on his face.

“Here,” he says, setting the list back on the side table and taking a paperback out of his overnight bag. “You wanna try this instead?”

 _The Devil in the White City_. Mike pushes the blanket down to his chest.

“I’ve read that already.”

I think.

Harvey offers it again. “I know,” he says. Alright, well, that’s good. “But it’s still more interesting than these, so how about you read to me a little?”

Sounds like a plan; who knows, it might even be kind of fun. Mike takes the book and opens it right in the middle.

“The Cold-Blooded Fact,” he reads as Harvey settles back in his chair. Mike pushes himself back to sit up straight and blinks a few times to clear his vision when the words go out of focus.

“At the start of January 1893 the weather turned cold and stayed cold, the temperature falling to twenty degrees below zero.”

Glancing hesitantly out of the corner of his eye, Mike sees Harvey’s pained smile, and he appreciates that Harvey didn’t make a big deal out of it when he slurred the word “temperature.”

Don’t worry, I heard it. I know what I did.

“The tem-per-a-ture falling to twenty degrees below zero,” he repeats, enunciating as precisely as he can.

Harvey rests his elbow on the armrest and his chin in his hand.

It’s going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Larson, E. (2003). _The Devil in the White City_. New York, NY: Random House, Inc.


	3. Chapter 3

Taking tentative steps across the floor, Donna peers around the curtain with her lips pursed and her eyes squinted as though she thinks that if she makes herself as small and unobtrusive as possible, she can check on Mike without waking him. She needn’t have bothered, seeing as how he isn’t sleeping in the first place; he wonders if there’s another reason for her efforts to be stealthy, like maybe something she’s afraid of, something she doesn’t want to see.

Mike doesn’t think he looks that bad, considering.

“Hey,” Donna croons, creeping around to the foot of the bed. “How are you doing?”

Mike looks around at the cramped room, at the sterile walls with that gross teal accent running along the bottom and the outlet over in the corner with dried paint clogging up the socket.

“Fine.”

She smiles and nods and acts like she believes him.

“I brought somebody to see you,” she offers as Jessica steps up beside her, smiling affably.

Mike looks at them and waits for her to say whatever it is she’s come here to say. After a few seconds of silence, Jessica glances at Donna like she’s asking for instructions, or permission; it’s a weird look on her, that sort of deference. He doesn’t like it.

Then she takes a quiet breath in through her nose and comes around to the side of the bed with her hands clasped behind her back, and he knows exactly what she’s going to say.

“Hi, Mike. Remember me?”

There it is.

“Jessica,” he says, because he’s learned by now that people like it better that way than if he says “Yes” and they have to double check with someone else that he isn’t just being agreeable.

“Yeah,” she affirms. “I haven’t seen you for awhile.”

“Nope,” he agrees. It’s not much of a conversation starter, but then, it’s not like he asked her to come.

“What have you been getting up to around here?” she asks, still with that modest smile on her face. “Keeping busy?”

“Lots of therapy,” he replies. Jessica looks at Donna, who sort of nods and shakes her head at the same time, and he knows what they’ll be talking about when they leave here.

“Well,” she says when she turns back to him, “don’t worry, there’ll be plenty for you to do when you come back to work.”

How…optimistic. No, wait, that was on purpose; she’s trying to be nice. He should appreciate the effort.

“Thanks.”

That’ll do it. She smiles a little wider, and he turns his head to look at the clock on the side table. Occupational therapy is at eleven fifteen; he wonders if Donna knows, or if the doctors warned Jessica before she came up that her visit would have to be a short one. It’s almost eleven now, and they’ll have to leave soon; come to think of it, maybe that’s why they’re here now in the first place.

Jessica looks around the room as though she’s never seen it before. He wonders if she hasn’t.

“Is there anything you need?” she asks.

Probably. Mike shrugs.

“No.” After a beat, he looks out the window, but it doesn’t give him any ideas. “Thank you.”

She nods, her smile gone now and a little crease deepening between her eyes. “I’ll keep in touch,” she assures him. She probably means it, too. Maybe she’ll even follow through.

“Okay,” he says.

With one last awkward glance around, she and Donna turn to walk away, back to the other side of the curtain; at almost the same moment, Harvey sidles into the room, pressing his back to the wall to let them pass, and Jessica murmurs something that makes him nod, but Mike can’t hear what it is. Then they’re gone, and the door closes, and Mike thinks he should have asked Jessica for an MP3 player.

Oh, well.

Harvey comes to the side of the bed and stands with his feet weirdly far apart.

“You ready for OT?” he asks. “Need to use the bathroom or anything?”

Mike pushes the covers down. “No,” he says, shuffling around to set his feet on the floor. Harvey offers his arm for Mike to balance on, but he doesn’t take it, doesn’t need it; thanks, but everything is fine for now.

They walk across the room, and Harvey holds the door open. There’s a wheelchair in the hall.

“I know,” Harvey commiserates as Mike stares at it. “But as long as you’re here, you’ve gotta use it. Come on, you want me to push you?”

Mike sits heavily, propping his feet in the footholds and rolling the wheels back and forth under his palms.

“Okay.”

It’s fine. He doesn’t remember how to get there, anyway.

Harvey wheels him down the hall and around the corner to the elevators, and oh yeah, that’s right, the room is upstairs. Or is it downstairs? One level difference, one way or the other.

Harvey presses the button, _2_ , and Mike pulls on his flimsy t-shirt.

“Any idea what you’ll be doing today?” Harvey asks as the elevator begins its slow descent. Mike shrugs.

“Same stuff, probably,” he guesses without much idea of what that means. “Why aren’t you at work?”

The door slides open with a little rattle and Harvey wheels him out into a hallway that feels sort of familiar. “Today’s Saturday.”

Oh. Well, Mike figures he can be forgiven; it’s not as though he has any reason to keep track.

“Okay,” Harvey says when they stop in front of a room that Mike recognizes. A small, dark-haired young woman named Elizabet—she prefers “Liza,” she said—stands at the little table in the corner, holding a book that can’t be more than fifteen pages long.

Mike pushes down on the armrests of the wheelchair to help him stand.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Harvey promises. Mike nods.

“Okay.”

Then Harvey goes, parking the chair right outside the door, and Mike goes in to sit at the little table in the corner.

“Hi, Mike,” Liza says, sitting opposite him and setting her little book down. “How are you doing today?”

“Fine,” Mike says. “Same as yesterday.”

She nods, and Mike figures that was about the answer she expected.

“Do you remember that last time we met, I told you we’d be doing something a little different today?”

Mike fixates on a scratch in the linoleum in front of the makeshift kitchenette at the back of the room, and tries to remember what he did yesterday. Or was it two days ago? Maybe three? It doesn’t matter.

“Kind of.”

She smiles, and picks the book back up. “That’s okay. Anyway, but before we get to that, how about another story?”

As though he has a choice. Mike rests his elbow on the table and props his chin on his fist as she lays the book out in front of him; this one has a girl on a bicycle on the front cover, with a little village in the background. He thinks he might recognize it, but then, all these books look pretty much the same.

“Let me know when you’re done,” she instructs, “and we’ll get started on the test.”

He flips the cover open. _Janny’s Busy Day_ , it’s called. Great. It takes him maybe ten minutes to read the whole thing, and the pictures don’t even have any color.

Liza takes the book back after he’s closed it. “Okay, you ready? Alright. What color was Janny’s bike?”

“Blue,” Mike replies at once. “Bright blue. With a silver basket.”

“Very good. Where did Janny need to go after the cake shop?”

“To the dog park,” he recalls. After a beat, Liza makes a little tic mark on one of the worksheets in the stack in front of her.

“Anywhere else?”

Mike frowns. _As Janny took the box of cakes from the shop owner, she looked up at the clock over his head; she had to be home by two thirty to take Jerry to the dog park, and it was already two fifteen!_

God dammit.

“Home.”

Liza makes another tic mark on her report. She never lets him see what she’s writing, but it isn’t hard to guess; every tic mark is another day he’ll have to spend on these stupid stories, another one of these damn tests he’ll have to sit through. If this place was a school, he’d definitely be failing out. Still, they keep going, and she never seems to have it in her to tell him what an idiot he is.

“Great!” she praises when the test is finally over. “Now, a little change of pace; today we’re going to be making cupcakes, how does that sound?”

Mike picks up the box of cake mix she’s set on the table between them and flips it over to look at the instructions on the back. “Why?”

“It’ll be good practice to follow the directions,” she explains, standing and walking to the kitchenette behind them. “And keep track of a sequential set of actions.”

At least she used the word “sequential.” That’s something.

Liza sets out all the equipment, but she lets Mike take all the measurements himself. She doesn’t even try to remind him which one is the teaspoon (smaller, bright pink) and which is the tablespoon (bigger, green, the painted letters “Tbs” along the handle partially worn away by too many awkward hands struggling to hold it steady long enough to level the measurement).

“We’re out of time for today,” she says as they put the cakes in the oven, “but I’ll take these out when they’re done, and I think you have physical therapy right now, right? So you can stop by after that so we can decorate them, okay? I’ve got some frosting here; maybe Rachel would like one too, you can take some back for her.”

Mike looks down at the glowing oven door, an ominous sort of orange. The oven itself is pretty old fashioned, steel and rust spots and sharp corners; he wonders how many times it’s caught fire.

“Okay.”

Liza smiles at something over his shoulder. “I think Harvey’s here to pick you up.”

So he is. Mike dallies uncertainly with one of the generic stainless steel mixing bowls for a moment before he decides that it’s probably a better idea to put it in the sink than back on the cheap Formica counter, which already has smudges of raw dough on it from where his spoon missed the cupcake tin a couple of times.

Harvey smiles at Liza, and she waves at them on their way out the door.

“How’d it go?” Harvey asks as Mike sits in the wheelchair and wheels himself the length of maybe five floor tiles forward before Harvey takes the handles and begins to push.

“Okay,” Mike says, thinking about the cupcakes. Rachel probably will appreciate one, although he isn’t sure whether she’ll actually eat it or just praise him for having made it. Then he thinks back to the tic marks, and Janny and her dog, and he doesn’t much feel like going to physical therapy anymore.

“I’m tired.”

Harvey presses the call button for the elevator. “I’m sure Jason will listen if you tell him that.”

But you still have to go.

Mike sinks down in the wheelchair and feels his back start to ache along the left side.

\---

Lying in bed at night, late enough that the sky outside has been dark for awhile, Mike draws his knees up and laces his fingers together to keep the right one, but only the right one, pinned to his chest as he looks wearily out the window. It’s been a long day, today, even though he doesn’t think he did much more than he usually does on any other day, and he wonders if this is what getting better feels like. It’s more of a mixed bag than he would’ve thought.

Not that he had any expectations, but still.

_You can stop by after your next session so we can decorate them._

FUCK.

Mike twitches, closing his eyes tight and hugging his knee closer to his chest.

This is a stupid thing to be worried about. A stupid thing. Liza said she would take the cupcakes out of the oven herself, so nothing’s burned, nothing’s ruined, and no one’s come to scold him, or yell at him, so he isn’t in trouble or anything like that. Harvey didn’t even know he was supposed to go back, so he won’t blame Mike, he won’t yell at him or tease him or worry over him. Everything is fine, everything is fine.

Gripping the edge of the blanket in his fist, Mike draws it up over his head and tucks it underneath his temple. This probably isn’t the first time he’s cried himself to sleep.

To be fair, it probably won’t be the last.


	4. Chapter 4

Every now and again, Mike gets a certain sense of comfort from being here, from being at this place that feels so much like home; no, not home, exactly, more like a dormitory, a summer camp, a…training facility. One of those places where he knows how to navigate the halls, how to get from point A to point B by the prescribed route and can take pride in being able to guide unfamiliar visitors around after him, but only by directing them from artifact to artifact, “Turn left at the weird poster and then you walk for awhile until you get to the place where the paint changes color,” none of that “Then you walk down the hall to Room 1357” bullshit. Not that he ever has visitors who need showing around, being that Rachel and Harvey know this place as well as he does—probably better—but it’s a nice thought, every now and again, that he could, if he had to. If it came to that.

The prescribed route from his room to the gym for physical therapy is the easiest, by far: Out the door, turn right, down the hall toward the double doors at the end (the doors are always open, in case of emergency), a straight line, no problem. If someone stops to say hello, make sure to say it back; do you know them? Good. You don’t? They probably know you; for now, just act like you remember, and everything will be alright. It’ll come back to you, probably.

The hallway feels extra wide today. Mike folds his arms across his chest as he walks to the gym for physical therapy.

Suddenly, appearing out of thin air a few feet away, a man stops. Freezes. Stares at Mike as though he’s the most stunning thing he’s ever seen, or the most confusing.

“Mike,” Benjamin says, taking a step closer, stopping when he doesn’t do the same.

“What are you doing here?” Mike asks, walking down the hall, toward the gym for physical therapy.

“I’m—visiting a friend,” Benjamin says uncomfortably. “This is kind of weird, I didn’t know you were here.”

Mike nods.

“How—how are you?” Benjamin asks. Mike tries to put his hands in his pockets before he remembers that these pants don’t have any.

“I’m okay,” he says, which is a relative measure. “What’s up?”

That was a stupid question.

Benjamin looks down at his shoes.

“I’m okay,” he says. “I’m just going to look for my friend, it, uh, it was…good to see you.”

Mike nods.

Benjamin walks off quickly, and Mike frowns. Benjamin works at the firm, Benjamin works in the IT department, Benjamin is a friend; would he come here to visit Mike? To check on him? Has he been here before? Is he embarrassed to be here now? Did Mike do something wrong?

Huh.

Oh, well.

Mike walks down the hall to the gym for physical therapy; Jason wants to work on the vertigo today.

\---

This isn’t his bed.

This is a bed very similar to his bed, but pressed right up against the wall, underneath a normal-sized window, and he isn’t sure if the room the bed is in is much smaller than his room or it just feels that way because of the curtain drawn around him. Rachel sits at his bedside, on a stool, and he feels sort of claustrophobic.

Footsteps, out in the hall; someone’s coming this way.

Rachel looks over her shoulder as the curtain moves, shoved back by a stocky, balding man with wire-rim glasses and a friendly sort of face. Doctor Irving, Mike remembers. They’ve met several times, that’s for sure, but Mike doesn’t know why.

“There’s my miracle man,” Doctor Irving says cheerfully. “Mike, how are we doing today?”

Mike glares at him. He hates it when he calls him that.

“Fine.”

“Alright,” Doctor Irving says, smiling as though Mike’s making a joke. He sets the clipboard in his arm down on a small table behind him and takes the stethoscope off his neck, inserting the ear plugs into his ears and holding up the drum. “You wanna pull up your shirt for me?”

The metal doesn’t feel particularly cold on his skin. Doctor Irving moves it from his chest to his abdomen, pressing down on the fleshy parts, and Mike tightens his abdominal muscles reflexively.

“Try to relax,” Doctor Irving says, but it doesn’t really matter, seeing as how he seems to have finished whatever he was doing; Mike lowers his shirt and squirms back down under the covers as Doctor Irving picks his clipboard back up and makes a note. “Alright, well, you seem to be coming along great,” he says in a congratulatory sort of way, as though it’s Mike’s decision whether his bones and organs and all that are going to heal properly. “How are you doing with your therapy, anybody giving you any problems?”

Mike thinks about Jason assuring him that it’s hard to balance on one foot with his eyes closed, and he should be proud that he held it for six whole seconds, even though last time he held it for eight. He thinks about Peter making him recite the sentence “The box was small and wrapped in paper with tiny silver and red glitter dots” over and over for their whole half hour session until he can say it without sounding like he’s got cotton in his mouth. He thinks about Liza reading him short stories and asking him trivia questions, and all the tic marks he has to watch her make in her records when he gets the little details wrong even though it’s only been a couple of minutes.

He thinks about failure, and how none of them have ever used the word before, and how he knows that none of them ever will. He wonders if they know they don’t need to, if they know that he’ll fill it in himself without any help.

He thinks about cupcakes and frosting.

“It’s fine.”

Doctor Irving grins as he writes something on his clipboard.

“Great.”

Rachel smiles.

“So your bloodwork is all looking pretty good,” Doctor Irving says, “it doesn’t look like we have anything to worry about, and you’ve got an MRI coming up next week, so we’ll be able to see how everything’s coming along up there.”

“Up there,” as though they think that if they don’t say the real words, he won’t know how bad it is, he won’t be frightened. “Trauma.” “Brain injury.” Mike knows what’s going on, he isn’t a child. He’s broken, they don’t have to try to hide it.

“Is that the long one?” he asks Rachel, who tries to keep her smile on but clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Hasn’t he asked her this before? Or was it Harvey? Maybe someone else? It doesn’t matter, though, since she should understand. There aren’t a hell of a lot of things he might be talking about, are there? She should get it, shouldn’t she, why doesn’t she know what he means?

“The MRI?” Doctor Irving asks. “It’ll be about forty-five minutes.”

The long one.

“What,” Rachel says, “what’s the short one?”

Doctor Irving looks at Mike. Mike frowns.

“The other one,” he says. “The shorter one.”

“CT scan,” Doctor Irving realizes. Mike looks at him.

Obviously.

“No,” Doctor Irving says, “we’re not going to be doing any more CT scans unless something goes wrong, but I’m not expecting that to happen any time soon.”

Any time soon.

Mike pulls the covers up to his chin.

“All your bones have healed well,” Doctor Irving says, glancing from his clipboard to Mike and back. “I’m not seeing any residual issues with the sinus fractures, and you’re not having any trouble breathing, are you?”

Mike inhales deeply, and his chest hurts a little, but that’s probably because he’s lying on his back. He turns his head to the right.

“No.”

“Mm-hm.”

Doctor Irving makes a check mark on his clipboard, and Mike’s chin bumps against his raised clavicle.

“My shoulder hurts.”

“You said that before,” Doctor Irving says mildly, and Mike does his best not to glare again. “There’s not much we can do about it for now, but you’ll keep working on it in physical therapy, that should help with the discomfort. If you’re worried about how it looks, you can think about looking into cosmetic surgery in a couple of years, but the surgeons at Stony Brook did everything they could at the time and it’s not going to cause you any real problems.”

“Cosmetic surgery?” Rachel repeats. “To do what, why does he need cosmetic surgery?”

“He doesn’t,” Doctor Irving says slowly. “It might be hard to see clearly while he’s lying down, but, Mike, if you’d move your shirt down—here, you can see the bone is sort of jutting out on the right side more than on the left? And if you feel along here, you’d be able to feel it, where the break was.”

Rachel raises her hand toward Mike’s chest; running her fingers along his collarbone, she doesn’t seem to notice when he presses his body back into the mattress.

“Oh,” she murmurs, “yes, I can feel it.”

Mike shoves himself back into the pillows, squirming away from her touch, and she smiles, stroking his neck.

More surgery. Pointless surgery. She wants him to get it, he can tell, he knows she does; she won’t say it, not right now, but down the line, “in a couple of years,” she’ll start bringing it up.

Lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his mind is suddenly filled with the memory of a bright light shining down, two hazy figures with their faces obscured by surgical masks, their hair hidden under paper caps; it might be a memory, it might be real, a fleeting moment of failing anesthesia, or maybe it’s a fiction created by his brain trying to put some sense into this mess, trying to manufacture a touchstone for him in the mire of everything he’s forgotten. Maybe it’s a scene from a movie, something he imagined reading a book. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

More surgery.

No. He won’t.

She can say whatever she wants.

He won’t.

“Okay Mike,” Doctor Irving says, looking up from his clipboard with a big smile on his friendly face. “Anything else you want to tell me, do you have any questions?”

How much longer?

It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care.

“No.”

Doctor Irving nods; Mike wonders if he’s not pushing for more because he knows it won’t get him anywhere or he genuinely believes that Mike’s telling him the truth.

Whatever.

“Alright, good,” Doctor Irving says. “I’ll tell you, Mike, you must be meant for great things.”

Rachel smiles.

Mike’s chest hurts.

Then Doctor Irving is gone, walking out into the hall as though he’s already forgotten Mike entirely, and Rachel just keeps smiling as she stands up from her stool, pushing it to the side and pulling the curtain back as she waits for Mike to get out of bed, as though he’s supposed to know where to go next.

Mike sits up and sets his hands down between his thighs. If he leans back a little, he can see one of the wheels of his wheelchair outside the door. Well, a wheelchair, anyway; he isn’t sure if he has his own.

“Come on,” Rachel says. “Let’s go back to your room, you want to watch a movie?”

Mike pushes himself out of bed. His legs feel fine; he can walk all the way back to the room, probably. Wherever it is.

Probably.

It depends.

“Mike?”

“What movie?”

Rachel shrugs. “I wasn’t really thinking of anything specific, but I’m sure I could find something.”

He shakes his head and lowers himself into the chair. Rachel sighs.

“Okay, so…what do you want to do?”

Nothing.

“I don’t know.” He nudges the chair forward. “Where’s Harvey?”

“I’m not sure,” she says, making her way down the hall at a pace he figures is much slower than her usual power walk. “It’s three thirty, he’s probably at work.”

Must be a weekday.

About the time it becomes obvious that Rachel expects him to follow her on his own, she seems to realize he hasn’t moved; turning with an expression only slightly bewildered, she hurries back to grab the handles of his wheelchair as he begins to push the wheels, the rubber immediately scraping his bare palms.

“No no,” she assures him, “stop, god, sorry, I’ll get it.”

Mike shoves the wheels forward dramatically, letting momentum and gravity carry him toward the elevators as Rachel rushes to catch him. The chair stops with a sharp jolt when she grabs the handles and tries to regain her footing, and Mike rests his arms on his lap.

They board the elevator as a middle-aged man and a young girl disembark; the man smiles at Mike, who pretends not to see him, and Rachel presses the button for the third floor. The ride isn’t long; one floor, probably. Down, it feels like.

“That was a sweet thing for Doctor Irving to say,” Rachel says as the doors open again, wheeling him down a hall that he’s starting to recognize.

“What?”

Rachel hums in a mellow way that sounds like she’s smiling. “That you must be destined to do something really amazing. It was nice.”

Mike’s heart hurts.

“Okay.”

“I always knew you were meant for greatness,” she says, and it sounds like it’s meant to be a joke, meant to be a tease, but she doesn’t get it, she’s not allowed.

Mike’s face is hot.

“Don’t say that.”

Rachel parks the chair in front of a room that must be Mike’s; he knows by the distance from the gym down the hall, by the way the door looks familiar even though it looks just like all the other doors and he isn’t really sure what makes this one any different. She stands beside it, waiting for Mike to stand up, to walk in, to go back to bed.

“Don’t say what?”

He grabs the knit curtain on the way past, dragging it shut behind him.

“I’m meant for greatness.”

Shoving the blankets down, Mike climbs into bed as Rachel stands at his bedside and waits with a tender smile on her face for him to settle. He tries to remember the last time she wasn’t smiling at least a little bit and finds that he can’t.

The moment he stops fidgeting with the blankets, she opens her arms and leans forward.

No no no, no, please, please don’t.

Pressing her face into the juncture of his shoulder, she pulls him close, and he wonders if she’s ignoring the way he’s gone tense and unresponsive or she thinks this is just another part of the healing process.

“Mike,” she murmurs into his hair. Her breath tickles his ear; he tries not to shove her away.

He fixes his gaze on the delicate wire mesh reinforcing the window glass.

“What.”

She sighs, and he feels sort of lightheaded.

“I’m so proud of you.”

He stiffens his arms and thinks about how he wants to shove her away.

She squeezes him tight and makes a sound like she’s just eaten something delicious, and he wants to shove her away.

She steps back, cradling her arms and smiling softly, and it takes him awhile to relax into the pillows propped behind his shoulders.

“So,” she says, taking a step back and sitting in the chair that’s always just sort of there, “what do you want to do? What do you want to talk about?”

He looks down at his hands.

“I want to play gin.”

She looks startled. “With me? Okay, I think Harvey left a deck in the drawer, you wanna check?”

Oh. Oh, right.

“No.”

It’s funny, but she doesn’t seem disappointed. She doesn’t even seem surprised.

“So what do you want to talk about?”

Nothing.

He shrugs.

“I’m tired.”

“Oh,” she says at once, “do you want to take a nap?”

He slides down under the blankets and closes his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to sound like he’s already begun to fall asleep.

“Okay,” she whispers. “I’m just going to sit here and read, is that okay?”

Mike sighs.

“Whatever.”

“Okay.”

Opening his eyes just a bit, barely enough to see through his lashes, he watches Rachel carefully open a thick folder in her lap, flipping through the pages and flinching at the fluttering noise as though it might wake him, as though that would be the worst thing in the world. He turns his head to face away from the window she sits beneath, and it crosses his mind that falling asleep for real might not be such a bad idea after all.

Might as well.


	5. Chapter 5

Lying flat on his back on the treatment table, Mike raises his right leg into the air, interlaces his fingers behind his calf, and pulls towards his chest. He pulls until it begins to burn, until pulling any more, any farther would surely break something, snap something; he pulls until his leg begins to quiver, to violently shudder, which is terribly embarrassing and makes him drop the stretch, holding his knee shyly against his stomach.

“Hey,” Jason says, standing to his right between the treatment table and the wall, “you okay, what happened? What’s wrong?”

Mike rocks his leg left and right. “It was shaking.”

Jason looks at his hands cradling his shin. “Yeah,” he says, “you’re stretching it farther than it’s used to going, so it’s feeling unstable, but the more you do it, it’ll start to go away.”

Mike drops his leg to the cushioned tabletop.

“So come on,” Jason says, “get it back up there, let’s go.”

Lacing his fingers behind his thigh, Mike raises his leg back up into the air, sliding his clasped hands up to his calf and slowly pulling back. He pulls, and he pulls, right up to the moment his foot starts to shake; splitting his focus between holding the stretch and holding his foot still, he finds mild to moderate success with both, but then Jason places his hand on Mike’s heel and pushes gently, and his entire leg begins to tremble.

“It’s okay,” Jason soothes, “let’s keep going. Alright. Three; two, and one.”

Mike lowers his leg and lays his hands on his chest as he looks up at the ceiling.

“Alright,” Jason says, clapping his hands together, “let’s go, other side.”

Mike closes his eyes tight and hoists his left leg into the air, grabbing behind his locked knee and pulling as he pretends he can’t feel the tremor already rattling down. He counts the passing seconds, which is an okay distraction that’s not as good as being alone, but it’s good. Good enough.

“Nice job,” Jason says fifteen seconds later. “Let’s finish up on the balance beam.”

Mike slides off the treatment table as Jason demonstrates walking along the beam heel-to-toe, marching from end to end. Fixing his eyes on Jason’s feet, he tries to memorize the motion, heel to toe, heel to toe, eyes up, arms out.

It doesn’t click.

He’ll try anyway.

\---

Harvey sits beside the bed in the chair that’s always just sort of there, taking notes in the margins of whatever it is he’s reading; maybe a brief, maybe a contract, or a merger agreement. Mike hasn’t bothered to ask. He came by yesterday, too, Harvey did; maybe it’s the weekend. Maybe a holiday.

“You wanna play any cards?” Harvey asks, as he does from time to time.

No, not right now. Not in the mood.

“Do you let me win?”

Harvey looks up from his files with a funny sort of smile on his face. “Would I do that to you?” he asks. “You beat me when you were under anesthetic, you could barely hold your cards up and you still kicked my ass. Pretty sure you can take me on now.”

When I was what?

Mike balls the blanket up in his fist.

“Why was I under anesthetic?”

Harvey sets the papers in his lap down on the floor. “When you had your first surgery at Stony Brook,” he says, “they had to take out a piece of your skull to relieve the pressure on your brain. So until the swelling had gone down enough that they could put it back, they kept it—the piece of skull, they kept it in your abdomen, so it would stay alive, so it was—uh, surrounded by living tissue. By the time you were ready for the next part of the procedure, to put it back, you were already here, at Mount Sinai, and it had been…a few weeks, almost a month. Long enough that you were up for a couple rounds of gin.”

Mike slides down the bed until his shoulder blades are pressed against the pillows. It’s bad posture, and he should correct it, but it’s very comfortable.

“This was in the pre-op, the waiting room, when we were playing,” Harvey goes on, almost laughing, “when you were waiting to be taken into surgery, after you’d already been prepped; you know, all doped up, and we’re just killing time playing a couple hands, and you, of course you can barely hold your cards, and you wiped the _floor_ with me.”

A vision comes to mind suddenly, a snapshot of Mike sitting in a hospital bed, partly identifiable, partly generic silhouette; Harvey sits in a chair at his bedside, holding six or seven cards and looking down at them studiously as the cards in Mike’s hand droop forward, visible and obvious. Is it a memory? A moment of near-perfect recall?

Who ever heard of a memory in third person?

Mike pulls the blanket up to his chest.

“Did you let me win?”

The spark goes out of Harvey’s eyes at Mike’s question, his enthusiasm suddenly falling away as he smiles softens, sobers. Mike watches him press his lips together, looking away for a moment before he turns back with a different expression that Mike has a hard time putting a name to.

“I promise,” Harvey says, “whenever we play cards, I never let you win.”

Mike nods.

Okay.

Harvey smiles again, like he can’t help it.

“You know,” he says, “when we first got here, the doctors would only let one of us stay with you overnight, me or Rachel, and they asked you who you wanted, and right away, you said— Well, I mean you couldn’t really speak, then, at that point, you, you tried, but we weren’t sure what you were trying to say, and you ended up—”

Tipping his head back a bit, looking above Mike’s head to the ceiling, he almost laughs again.

“We were standing there,” he says, “she and I, with the doctors, and you reached out and you grabbed my hand, my wrist, like…like it was the most obvious thing in the whole goddamn world.”

Mike lies down on his side.

Okay.

“Was she mad?”

“Rachel?” Harvey lowers his head again, his lips pursed and his shoulders shrugging uncomfortably. “I think she was surprised, but I think mostly she was glad you answered the question, she was glad you were getting better. It’s been hard for her, she… She’s had a rough time.”

Even though Mike’s the one who was hit by a car.

“Mm.”

Pausing for just a second, Harvey leans forward to rest his arms in his lap. “It’s been hard on all of us, Mike, but no one’s saying it hasn’t been the hardest on you.”

Yeah.

Mike slides his hand underneath his head.

“Did you stay every night?”

Harvey smiles. “The first week, I did,” he says. “Then I had to go back to work for a few days, but I cut out early on Thursday. Took a long weekend.”

Mike turns into his pillow. Harvey has a primed expression on his face like he’s waiting to keep talking, like he’s waiting for Mike to ask him what happened in those first weeks, but Mike doesn’t feel much like telling him that he doesn’t want to know.

The silence, though. The silence is too heavy.

“What about Rachel?” he asks dully, tilting his face away from the bed just enough for his voice to be audible. Harvey smiles again, and it looks a little different but Mike isn’t sure why.

“She was here every night I couldn’t be,” he says. “She didn’t even take personal days, she just marched into Jessica’s office and told her flat out, she wasn’t leaving you alone in this hospital for one second she didn’t have to.”

That’s…nice of her.

“Jessica let her?”

Harvey leans back in his chair. “I don’t think she was interested in putting up much of a fight,” he says. “Although to be honest with you, if it was anyone but you, I’m not sure she’d be this permissive with all of us.”

“Mm.”

Good thing it’s him, then.

After a few minutes, Harvey picks up the papers he set down on the floor and gets back to making notes in the margins.

Mike rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling.

\---

No one stays overnight anymore.

The hospital is still busy, the hall lights shining through the small window in the closed door of his room, but no one stays with Mike after six, maybe seven o’clock. Mike doesn’t mind, really, but it’s funny now, thinking about what Harvey told him this afternoon, how only one person was allowed to stay in the beginning, that he needed to choose between them, Harvey and Rachel, and it didn’t seem to them to be much of a choice at all. They were so resistant to leave him alone for even a minute, the two of them, and now…

Mike pulls the blanket up to his chin and tips his head back. He wonders if he minded, back then. If he ever wanted a moment to himself, if he ever tried to tell them to go away. Not that it would have mattered, probably, but it’s something to think about.

He’d keep thinking about it, too, if it didn’t put such a tight sensation in his chest.

_You reached out and you grabbed my hand._

Mike’s face feels warm, and his vision is out of focus.

A whole life exists behind him. Thirty-six years of history, of adventures and life lessons and friendships and enemies and wins and losses, thirty-six years of _living,_ and he doesn’t remember…

He doesn’t remember any of it.

He breathes a long sigh and crosses his arms underneath the blanket.

Thirty-six years of history are lost in time, left to be pieced back together from other people’s vague recollections, gaps filled in with fictions and falsehoods. Everything is gone, and the replacements, the second- and thirdhand emulations, make him feel like dying.

Dying. There’s a thought.

Harvey would probably be sad. And Rachel, she’d be inconsolable for awhile. Jessica, Donna, Benjamin; there might be others, too. Doctor Irving keeps calling him “miracle man”; they probably went to a lot of trouble to keep him alive in the first place.

_You grabbed my wrist, like it was the most obvious thing in the whole goddamn world._

Thirty-six years, gone.

Mike wonders if crying might make everything seem not quite so bad, getting all this weight off his chest, but come to think of it, all he really feels is an overpowering sort of indifference, and he doesn’t see much of a point to putting in all that energy.

Thirty-six years of things he can’t remember.

It’s fine, though. He doesn’t really want to know.


	6. Chapter 6

The curtain is closed, and Mike smooths his hands over the blanket pulled up to his waist.

There’s a book on the side table, and an old worksheet of speech exercises with a condensation ring from an almost-empty pink plastic cup has a smudge of dirt or something across the side, but Mike can’t remember how long the cup’s been sitting there.

He smooths his hands over the blanket again. Apart from him, the room is empty; he doesn’t mind. No one’s here to ask him what he wants to do, how it’s going, how he’s feeling.

He wonders what it’s like to always be feeling something or other. It sounds exhausting.

People don’t like it when he says “Nothing,” though.

How are you feeling, Mike?

Fine. I’m fine. I feel fine. Everything is fine.

Good.

The door opens; he hears Rachel’s footsteps. She pushes the curtain back and smiles.

“Good morning,” she says brightly. “Ready for your first group session?”

Group therapy starts today, now that he’s done with speech therapy with Peter. Now that he’s gotten as much as he’s going to get out of that, taken it as far as it’s going to go. Doctor Irving seems to think it’s a mark of progress, a big step forward, though when he told them about the switch, he didn’t really explain why. Mike still doesn’t know what the point is.

He blinks slowly.

“Okay.”

She stands beside his bed, in front of the window, and smiles.

“It’s only, uh, nine thirty,” she says, “so is there anything you want to do before then?”

Group is at ten fifteen. Ten thirty. Ten something.

“No.”

She’ll fight him on it. She’ll say, “Let’s do some exercises,” or, “Let’s read a book,” or, “Talk to me, how did you sleep?” She doesn’t like it when he doesn’t want to do anything.

Except that she’s not looking at him, she’s looking at the floor, and that’s not how this is supposed to go.

“What?”

She looks up and smiles.

“What?” she repeats. “No, sorry, I was— Um. Never mind.”

Mike watches her keep smiling as the moment slips past.

“What?”

She bites her lip and lowers her gaze back to the floor as the smile fades. He wishes she’d hurry up with whatever it is that’s bothering her.

He isn’t sure he wants to know, but this is much more frustrating.

“Do you remember Emma?” she asks cautiously. “The girl staying in the room next to yours, the eleven year old?”

You don’t?

She probably remembers you.

“What about her?”

Rachel clears her throat and gathers her courage.

“She died yesterday.”

Oh. Well, never mind, then.

Mike waits for the punchline, but Rachel only looks away and wipes at her cheeks.

An eleven year old girl has died. An eleven year old girl who Mike apparently knew well enough to be held accountable for her name. A child who Mike had some kind of relationship with was alive yesterday until she wasn’t.

This isn’t just some thing that happened in a movie, or on the news. This is more than a thought experiment.

This is something to care about.

“What happened?”

Rachel clears her throat again and presses her palm to her eye.

“She um— I don’t know,” she mumbles, “they didn’t tell me very much. Something with an infection, her. Her parents didn’t really want to talk about it.”

Mike tucks the blanket in around his thighs. Rachel makes a sound like laughter, trying to pretend she isn’t crying. As though it isn’t obvious.

“Oh,” he says tonelessly.

“Do you remember what was wrong with her?” she asks abruptly. (Why would you ask me that?) “She has the same thing as you, Mike, she has a traumatic brain injury. She had the same surgery you had. She was doing fine, she was going to therapy, she was getting better.”

What a coincidence.

Maybe they talked a few times, maybe they commiserated about their experiences. Maybe they didn’t want to share, maybe they passed each other in the hall and averted their eyes.

Mike plucks at the blanket tucked around his thighs and wedges his hand under his knees.

“That could’ve been _you,_ Mike,” Rachel chokes out. “You could’ve _died._ ”

Yeah, he knows.

She stares at him with her red eyes, blinking back tears, and he wonders what she wants him to say next.

“I didn’t.”

She parts her lips, wincing incredulously, and he wonders if there was anything he could’ve said that would’ve come out right.

Maybe “I’m sorry,” except he didn’t really do anything wrong.

“Group therapy is at ten twenty,” she says then, stepping around to the foot of the bed and raising her hand weakly toward the door. “Let’s just… Let’s go.”

She walks with a shuffle in her step, and he untucks the blanket from around his legs, folding it over and setting his feet on the floor to follow her out. He shoves his feet into the soft slip-on shoes sticking out from under the bed as his mind fills with a vision, two or three seconds long, of himself in a wheelchair, urging himself to his feet, insisting that he can stand, he can walk, he’s fine. He knows he won’t be allowed, but he has to put up a fight, he has to try.

Mike walks with his arms held stiff at his sides, and Rachel takes his hand when he reaches her standing in the hall.

He thinks about asking her about it—the wheelchair, whether he used to use one—but she probably isn’t in the mood right now.

It’s fine, though. He doesn’t really care.

\---

Mike sits alone for six hundred and thirty-nine seconds before the group therapist shows up. Her name is Kaitlyn, according to her little plastic nametag; she’s a perky young woman with dark hair and thin lips, and Mike takes an immediate disliking to her. The first patient to arrive after Mike, a fifteen year old girl named Nicole, shows up five minutes before they’re supposed to start; she was hit by a car—same as Mike, Kaitlyn prompts them—and very clearly dislikes everyone else in the group except for Basil, an old man who wheels an IV stand around with him wherever he goes and who treats Nicole like a person instead of just a child.

There are three other patients, a woman and two men, but nothing about them is particularly interesting. Mike hears their names and forgets them within a few minutes. When they’re all sitting around the table, Kaitlyn passes out a simple logic puzzle for them to work on, and everyone begins exchanging pleasantries, asking questions like “How are you” and “How was your last meeting with Doctor Moss,” which mainly just remind Mike that they’ve all been working together for awhile and if he wants to join in, he’s going to have to make an effort.

He taps his pencil against the page in front of him.

“One Saturday, five friends visited the zoo. Each wore a different color t-shirt and each rushed to see their favorite animal upon arriving at the zoo. Using the clues provided, can you name each child’s favorite animal and what color t-shirt they wore?”

The puzzle only takes him about three minutes to complete; it’s unnerving to see everyone else frustratedly scribbling away, and he wonders if he’s misunderstood the instructions, or done something wrong, until he notices that Nicole is done, too, though she bends over her paper and pretends to still be working whenever Kaitlyn looks in her direction.

Doodling an abstract design in the corner of his worksheet, Mike wonders what he’s supposed to be getting out of all of this.

They must have put him in here for a reason. They’re professionals, they know what they’re doing.

He’ll figure it out.

It’s fine.

\---

For lunch, Harvey brings paninis from the deli on the corner. Then it’s time for a meeting with Doctor Irving; Harvey calls it a check-up, and Mike figures he doesn’t know what’s going to happen any more than Mike does.

Mike hoists himself up onto the examination table, the paper cover ripping under his legs as the he pushes far enough back to lean against the wall. Harvey looks up at the sound and Mike turns slightly to the side, not particularly embarrassed by his hospital gown but suddenly annoyed by the fact that he has to wear it. He’s not here for an MRI or anything; maybe Doctor Irving will check his heartbeat, or whatever doctors do with stethoscopes, but he’s pretty sure that can be done just as well around a t-shirt.

“Rachel tell you about Emma?” Harvey asks while they wait. Mike tips his head down toward his lap.

“Yeah.”

Harvey nods.

“How was group therapy?”

Mike looks up again. “Boring,” he says thoughtlessly, but Harvey only smirks.

“Meet anybody interesting?”

Mike shrugs. “I don’t think they care that I’m there,” he says. “Everyone kind of ignores each other.”

Harvey nods slowly.

“There’s a kid,” Mike recalls. “Most of them are older than me, but one of them’s teenager.”

“He bothering you?” Harvey asks, straightening up in his chair like he’s preparing to force the kid out of Mike’s group himself.

Mike shrugs again. “Her name’s Nicole,” he says. “She’s fine. She doesn’t talk much.”

“Let me know if she gets in your way,” Harvey instructs, leaving it up to Mike’s imagination what will happen to Nicole if she steps out of line. Mike isn’t sure Harvey has enough pull at the hospital to actually do anything, but he’s sure he’d put up a pretty tough fight.

He smiles quickly.

“I will.”

Harvey thins his lips, his whole face seeming to tighten up bitterly, but he doesn’t have time to say anything more before Doctor Irving walks into the exam room and shuts the door behind him.

“Hi Mike,” he says, looking down at the medical file in his hand. “How’s it going, everything okay? Anything I should be paying special attention to today?”

Anything special going on? Mike presses his nail into the paper exam table cover and draws a line alongside his leg.

My head hurts.

Yeah, well, you’ve said that before.

“No.”

“Great.” Doctor Irving folds back the cover of the file and takes a pen out of his pocket. “Real quick, I just need you to keep your head still and follow the pen with your eyes, okay, just your eyes.”

Doctor Irving moves the pen slowly to the left, and Mike’s eyes begin to ache as he moves his gaze along with it.

“Don’t move your head,” Doctor Irving repeats as he moves the pen to the right. “Just your eyes.”

Isn’t he, though?

Sitting up straight, Mike fixes his gaze straight ahead, gradually sliding it to the right until the pen comes into view and trying to ignore the lightheadedness that gradually creeps up from the base of his skull.

“Don’t move… Okay,” Doctor Irving says, lowering the pen and making a note in the chart, “good. Now hold out your arm for me, I’m just gonna take your pulse.”

Mike watches him strap the cuff to his bicep, sliding the drum of his stethoscope underneath as he inflates the bag.

“Alright,” he says, slinging the stethoscope back around his neck and removing the cuff from Mike’s arm. “Looks good. Now I’m going to give you three things I want you to remember, okay? Three things, and I want you to remember them, because five minutes from now, I’m going to ask you to repeat them back to me. Three things, you ready?”

Mike hunches his shoulders and sags down over his lap.

“Yeah.”

“George Washington,” Doctor Irving enunciates. “Twenty-one Broadway. Blue shoe.”

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

Mike nods.

“So Mike,” Doctor Irving says as he drums his fingers against the chart, “I got the results back from your last MRI, and everything looks pretty good; how’s your therapy coming along, everything going alright? I spoke to Jason yesterday and he seemed pretty optimistic, but is there anything you’re worried about?”

The room is tilted a little to the left.

Mike presses his fingers to the base of his skull.

“Is the vertigo ever going to get better?”

Doctor Irving looks down at the chart.

“It’s going to get better,” he says, “if you keep working on it, if you keep doing your exercises, but if you’re asking if it’s ever going to go away completely, it’s hard to say. Probably not.”

Harvey folds his arms across his chest and leans back in his chair, pressing his lips together the way he does when he’s furious about something but knows he can’t do anything to change it. Doctor Irving doesn’t seem to notice.

“See, Mike,” he goes on, “vertigo, your vertigo is caused by damage to your inner ear, so like I said, you can work on managing it, getting used to it and figuring out how to live with it, but it’s unlikely that it’ll stop entirely.”

Oh.

Mike leans back against the wall.

“Anything else?” Doctor Irving asks pleasantly. “Harvey?”

Harvey looks at Mike and lowers his crossed arms to his stomach.

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

“How about the amnesia?”

Doctor Irving sighs quietly.

“Mike, I know we’ve discussed this a few times already,” he warns, and Mike doesn’t point out that he doesn’t remember, being that the symbolism is too heavy-handed. “So Harvey, as I’m sure you already know, Mike’s forgotten— I can’t say how much, exactly, only Mike can tell us that, but he’s forgotten probably a pretty good amount from before the accident.”

“I understand that,” Harvey says coolly. Mike wonders if he and Doctor Irving have been fighting.

“Well,” Doctor Irving goes on, “we can’t determine just by looking at his brain which memories have been lost and which ones are still in there, and there’s no way of predicting what’ll come back, or when; I’d like to say he’ll recover some of it, but I really can’t tell you anything about how much, or how fast.”

“Is there anything we can do to help him?” Harvey asks, straightening up in his chair. “Show him pictures, or…talk to him about things that happened?”

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

“You could try that,” Doctor Irving says. “You can’t expect this to be like a movie, with the memories all rushing back in one big long montage, but it couldn’t hurt.”

Mike looks down at his knees.

Thirty-six years. Gone.

Keep them there.

“Alright, Mike,” Doctor Irving says, “do you have any other questions before we finish up?”

Thirty-six years.

“No.”

“Great.” Doctor Irving looks down at the chart. “Now. What were those three things I asked you to remember?”

Mike looks him dead in the eye.

“George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.”

So take that.

Doctor Irving writes something in the chart and smiles wide.

“That’s fantastic. Alright,” he says, looking up and nodding to Harvey, “we’re done for today, so you can just, head on back to your room.”

Mike rolls his eyes as Harvey stands, smiling tautly and pacing over to the exam table; Doctor Irving walks out the door, skimming the file in his hand, and Mike leans over to put his head between his knees.

After a moment, the door falls shut, and Harvey lays his hand on his back.

“Mike?”

Mike clasps his hands behind his calves, and Harvey moves his hand in little circles.

“You did good, Mike.”

Taking a deep breath, Mike feels Harvey’s hand rise and fall as his back expands and contracts.

_I’d like to say he’ll get some of it back._

“What happened?”

Harvey’s hand stills.

“What?”

Mike sits up, crossing his arms over his knees.

“What happened before I came here?”

Harvey pauses for a few seconds before he moves his hand and steps backwards.

It isn’t such a difficult question, is it? No, it’s okay; it isn’t that important, really. If Harvey doesn’t remember, if he doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter.

Then Harvey clears his throat and meets his gaze evenly.

“The guy who hit you, his name is Roy,” he says. “He has a friend with a helicopter, he called him and they flew you to the hospital; the doctors said you would’ve died if you’d had to wait for an ambulance. After the surgeries, they put you in a coma for twelve days so your brain could heal, so the swelling could go down. Rachel and I switched off staying at the hospital with you, but we were—we were both there when you woke up.”

You could’ve died.

Yeah, everyone keeps saying that.

Harvey clears his throat again.

“So you wanna head back?”

Yeah. Let’s go.

\---

It’s never really dark, even in the dead of night.

The hall lights seep in under the door, casting a glow across the floor that creeps past the curtain, which is always closed unless a nurse is checking up on him. Mike closes his eyes, which helps a little, but not much.

_I’d like to say he’ll get some of it back, but I really can’t tell you anything about how much, or how fast._

Would you like that? Would it be better for you if I remembered?

For no reason at all, a picture flashes in his mind, a picture of himself—or is it? Is he watching himself onscreen or seeing the world through his own eyes?

Yes and no, a bit of both.

Standing in the doorway to the bathroom, the one across from his bed, the little room with the door always open a crack, he clings bewilderedly to an IV stand, trying to figure out how to fit it in with him when he can barely squeeze just his body into the cramped space.

The vision ends before he finds out what happened. If it happened. Who knows.

_Is there anything we can do to help him?_

You could do nothing. You could leave it alone.

Mike closes his eyes tight and bites his lip as hard as he can.

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

_That’s fantastic._

Whatever you say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doctor Irving uses the horizontal gaze nystagmus test (moving a pen in front of Mike’s face and telling him to track it with his eyes without moving his head) to screen for a [vestibular disorder](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4936800/) (balance problems caused by inner ear and brain damage).
> 
> The [word memory test](https://academic.oup.com/acn/article/24/3/255/3979) is a standard memory test often conducted after a traumatic brain injury, or in other instances wherein a patient’s recall ability is in doubt.
> 
> Stiver, S. I. (2009). [Complications of decompressive craniectomy for traumatic brain injury](http://thejns.org/doi/pdf/10.3171/2009.4.FOCUS0965). _Journal of Neurosurgery, 26_ (6), E7.


	7. Chapter 7

Harvey waits at the foot of Mike’s bed for him to stand, to slip on his soft shoes; he follows him out into the hall, and he grimaces empathetically when Mike stops in front of the wheelchair parked there for him.

“Field trip,” Harvey says cryptically as a nurse approaches them. Mike looks between them and the chair for another few seconds before relenting without argument, sitting carefully as though he might be able to use the chair well enough to demonstrate that he doesn’t need to use it at all. The nurse takes her place behind him and wheels him toward the elevators, and Harvey seems content to merely keep pace alongside.

The nurse presses the button for the ground floor, and Harvey puts his hand on Mike’s shoulder for a second.

“Are you coming with us?” he asks the nurse as they step out into the lobby.

“Just to supervise,” she says, pushing Mike up the winding ramp toward a bank of glass doors. “I won’t get in your way.”

Where are we going?

Harvey holds the door open for the nurse to push Mike outside. Fresh air; it’s colder than Mike expected. Not that he has any reason to expect anything in particular, not that he knows what month it is, what day, but he could’ve sworn it was summer. July, maybe. August.

“How’s that feel?” Harvey asks as they make their way down the block. Mike takes a breath that smells only slightly different from what he’s used to, only a bit less chemical; a gust of wind stings inside his nostrils, and he reaches up to pinch them shut.

Harvey rubs his hand across his back.

“Just a little something different,” he says as they near the corner. “If you’re uncomfortable, you don’t like it, you just say the word, we’ll go right back inside.”

Mike looks up at him as the nurse parks the chair under a tree.

“What’re we doing?”

Rather than answer, Harvey turns his head to look over his shoulder; Mike tries to see what’s going on back there, but there are too many people wandering about for him to tell which ones are important.

“Alright,” Harvey says after a minute, “here they come.”

A tall, dark-haired man wearing a down vest waves to Harvey, striding over with a banal smile on his face. As he draws near, Mike notices the nylon strap clutched in his hand, the border collie trotting at his heels.

“Mike,” Harvey says formally, “this is Adam. And this, is Mango.”

The border collie stands placidly at the dark-haired man’s feet, looking up at Mike with its head titled in silent inquiry, or to hear them all better.

“Hey Mike,” the man, Adam, says with a smile. “Mango and I are volunteers with the Pet Assisted Therapy program, your doctors thought you might like hanging out with us for awhile.”

“Have I not been responding to traditional medication?” Mike asks sourly as Mango noses his hand.

Adam reaches down to scratch behind the dog’s ear. “We’re not trying to replace any of your treatment or anything,” he assures him. “We’re just here to try to help you de-stress a little. Do you have any pets at home?”

Mike thinks of a little black and white stuffed dog with bright blue eyes and soft fur that he remembers liking very much. He wonders whatever happened to it.

“No.”

Mango sits, and Adam nods.

“Mister Specter tells me you’re a corporate attorney, I guess that doesn’t really leave a lot of time for animal care.”

No kidding. Mike looks up at Harvey, who smiles timidly and doesn’t offer any elaboration.

“I like dogs,” Mike says, offering Mango the back of his hand to sniff as Adam visibly relaxes.

“I think Mango likes you, too,” he says. “You can pet her if you want, she’s very friendly.”

Slowly, Mike turns his hand over, gliding it up past Mango’s ear to the top of her head and scratching his nails against the base of her skull. She gives into it for a minute before seeming to grow bored, padding forward to drop her head in his lap with a loud sigh as Harvey laughs quietly; Mike glares up at him and Harvey coughs into his fist.

“Uh.” Harvey clears his throat. “How long are you guys here for?”

“We’re here as long as you need us,” Adam says readily.

That’s nice.

Harvey sets his hand down on Mike’s shoulder again. “What do you think, Mike? You two getting along okay?”

Mango licks his hand and Mike scratches under her chin.

“Can I get out of the chair?”

Harvey turns to the nurse with a querulous hum, his eyebrows arched and a smile tugging at his lips, but his enthusiasm stutters and fades as she slowly shakes her head “no.”

“He’s walking around the hospital,” Harvey bites out, “this is just a f— We’re just standing on a street corner, what do you think is going to happen?”

Mike cups Mango’s head in his hands and scratches underneath her jaw.

“It’s for the patient’s safety,” the nurse says patiently. “Hospital regulations.”

“The patient isn’t allowed to stand on his own two feet for his own _safety?_ ” Harvey snaps. “What’s he gonna do, step on a crack in the goddamn sidewalk?”

“Sir, it’s hospital—”

“Harvey,” Mike interrupts belatedly. The nurse seems more than happy to cede the floor, the tense standoff that follows accented by the hum of passing cars and the occasional sounds of the hospital doors opening and closing.

Mango whines and pushes her nose against Mike’s thigh.

Harvey presses his lips together and his hand down on Mike’s shoulder.

“I’ll be in touch with Doctor Irving,” Adam says uneasily as Mike strokes his hand down Mango’s neck.

After a moment, Harvey takes his hand back. Mike looks up at Adam.

“Thank you.”

Adam nods.

See you later, Mango.

\---

For lunch, Harvey runs out for paninis at the deli on the corner.

That was the plan, anyway. That was the plan until he got a call from Jessica, and she knows exactly what the situation is and she’s been cutting him, in Harvey’s words, “a hell of a lot of slack,” so if she’s calling him to come back to the office, it must be a real emergency. Harvey said something awhile back about Jessica wanting to land a big new client to compensate for the hit the firm’s taken with Mike out of commission, but Mike doesn’t know any of the details, being that he seems to have gone out of his way to avoid bringing it up since then.

“I’m sorry, Mike,” he says, sounding like he really means it. Mike shrugs; something like this was bound to happen. It’s probably been happening all along, it’s probably why Harvey hasn’t been able to spend as much time at the hospital as Rachel.

“Not just for this,” Harvey laments, “I mean the thing this morning, with the dog, I was just trying… I just wanted to give you a break, I saw a poster downstairs, it sound like— It sounded like fun, I just— I guess I didn’t think it through, I’m sorry. Really, I… I’m sorry.”

Mike scratches his thigh, suddenly very much wishing he had a dog to pet.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Are they going to come back tomorrow?”

Harvey doesn’t seem to know quite what to say to that.

“I,” he fumbles. “I can talk to Doctor Irving.”

Picking at his blanket, Mike nods. “Okay.” He smiles to himself; it probably won’t work out, but it’s nice of Harvey to try. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” Harvey clears his throat. “So I gotta go, but Rachel should be here soon, so, if you need anything, just…hold tight.”

With one last faltering pause, he walks out the door, and Mike tucks his legs up to his chest and drops his head back against his pillows and waits. Rachel shows up fifteen minutes later, or forty, or an hour, or something; it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care. She’s here now. She’s here, and she looks serious, for once, which is pretty annoying.

“Hey,” he says, sitting up when she sits in the chair beside his bed and folds her hands in her lap.

“Hi,” she replies curtly. “Listen, Mike, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Well, fuck.

“What?”

Maybe she didn’t expect him to be so eager to listen, or maybe she just didn’t bother to think ahead, but Rachel doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go after her opening announcement, parting her lips and then pinching them shut without a word. Mike waits, trying not to glare.

Rachel sighs.

“You remember last week,” she says, “when I told you about Emma?”

Pretty daring of her to assume something like that.

“Yeah.”

She sighs again.

“I’m a little worried,” she says, starting to talk with her hands as he watches impassively. “You just… You seemed like you didn’t really care, that she died, and I’m worried that you might be, uh… You might be repressing your emotions, and, I’m afraid of what could happen if you keep…doing, that.”

Repressing? Is that what she thinks is going on here?

He leans back and looks up at the ceiling.

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m not repressing anything.”

“Yeah, but Mike,” she presses immediately, “I— You didn’t really seem to be feeling _anything,_ but I mean this little girl just died, you must’ve felt something, I’m just kind of worried because I, I couldn’t tell, I mean. I couldn’t tell what you were thinking, at all.”

Sounds like she got it pretty well the first time around.

“I didn’t know her,” he says. “You were basically telling me that a patient at a hospital had died. Okay, so, that happens sometimes. What did you expect me to say?”

He can’t see her face, turned away as it is toward the far wall, but the silence is pretty telling. Whatever she expected him to say, it certainly wasn’t that; she’s probably horrified, maybe ashamed, and he’d really rather this didn’t devolve into an argument, even though it’s probably going to.

“You met her twice,” Rachel points out, turning back to him. “You did— I mean, you did know her, and even if you don’t remember her, she was a little girl, she was only eleven, and she _died._ ”

“I mean _I_ didn’t know her,” Mike reiterates. “I don’t remember meeting her, I don’t remember what she looks like, I don’t remember her name.”

“Her name is Emma.”

“Right, I know that now,” he says, uncertain of how to make this any clearer, “because you told me the other day. But I don’t remember anything…personally. I don’t remember _her,_ I don’t remember anything _about_ her that I didn’t hear from you.”

Rachel makes a disbelieving sound, kind of a choking cough, and Mike tries not to roll his eyes, he really does, but he doesn’t quite catch it in time.

“I can’t believe you,” she accuses (there being no other word for it). “The Mike Ross I know would _care_ that something like this had happened, he would be _heartbroken_ that this poor little girl lost her life, that, that her parents had to go home together, alone, to their big empty house because their daughter, their _child_ got an _infection_ after she— She came here to get _better,_ Mike, she came here to _heal,_ and now she’s _dead._ ” She thumps her hands down on the armrests of her chair, and Mike follows the jolting motion with his eyes.

“The Mike I know would care about that.”

Mike lies flat on his back and looks up at the ceiling.

And now what is he supposed to say? Rachel sounds like she’s about to cry, and all he really feels is the desire for her to go. Go, go away, go away and never come back.

_I’m Rachel Zane. I’ll be giving you your orientation. And let’s get it out of the way that I am not interested._

She’s here, though. She’s been here all along. Obviously she has, they’re engaged.

Right, that.

“Just tell me you feel something for her,” Rachel pleads thickly. “Mike.”

Shame, embarrassment, anxiety, nervousness, they all put a sickening twist in his gut, a prickly chill in the back of his head at the reminder of everything he doesn’t know, every expectation he’s afraid of failing, everything he doesn’t even remember that he’s supposed to aspire to be.

“I want to,” he says, which might be true, or it might not be. He hasn’t decided, he can’t quite tell.

Rachel sobs, and Mike hates her, just a little bit.

What did she think was going to happen?

“Oh, god,” she mumbles, and he hates her a little bit more.

“What do you want from me?” he asks flatly.

She cries a little bit harder, and he wishes she would shut up.

“I’m doing the best I can,” she blusters, finally, wiping the tears streaking down her cheeks and blinking quickly. “I’m trying my best to see the man I love inside of you, it’s just— It’s _hard_ sometimes, okay, but I am _trying._ ”

“I don’t know who that man _is!_ ”

He doesn’t know what made him say it. It’s true, he knows it is, but it always seemed like one of those things that wasn’t supposed to be spoken out loud. One of those things that would cause more problems than it solved, one of those things that would just confuse people, that no one would understand the right way. “The right way,” what even is that? How can he expect anyone else to understand him when he has no idea what he’s talking about?

Who even gives a shit?

Gasping, sniffling, Rachel pointedly stops herself crying and looks at him with some mix of pity, as though he’s the world’s greatest tragedy, and consolation, as though she’s going to fight to save him from…himself, probably. Shoving his hands under the blanket, he slides a little further down and desperately hopes she doesn’t try to touch him.

“But I do,” she says tremulously. She’ll help him get back to normal, she’ll help him get back to the way things were.

He clenches his fists as tight as he can, his nails biting into his palms.

“Can you leave me alone?”

She makes a breathy sound, the beginning of an immediate response thus delayed; he wonders if she’s going to be sensible, if she’s going to understand that this isn’t the moment for the rest of this conversation. “It’s a good start,” Kaitlyn might say; they’re “making progress,” as Liza might put it. “These things take time,” Jason might point out.

Then she reaches out to lay her hand on his shoulder, and he knows this isn’t going to end the way he’d like.

“I’m only trying to help you.”

Of course she is.

He has to be nice to her, because she’s only trying to help. He has to listen to her, because she knows what’s best. She has her instructions, how this is all supposed to go. He has to do what she thinks is right.

Says who?

Over her shoulder, out the window reinforced with delicate wire mesh, he looks at the buildings across the way, the unchanging scenery, anything better than looking her in the eye.

“Please,” he forces himself to beg. “Go away.”

She blinks her wet eyes slowly, clasping her hands and then reaching out to grasp his, even though they’re still tucked in under the blanket.

“You’re sure that’s what you want?” she asks, and how many times does he have to say it? How many different ways?

Get the fuck out of here before I lose my fucking mind.

“I want to be alone.”

Pressing her lips together, holding back the tears, she nods, squeezing his hand through the blanket, reaching up to touch his shoulder.

“I’ll be back later.”

He closes his eyes and presses his body back into the pillows, and she walks out the door and surely thinks herself a martyr.

He should be crying right now. He should be overcome with such sadness, such moroseness, such a sense of loss and regret that his vision ought to be blurred from all the tears he should be crying, lights sparkling in blinding bursts as he squeezes his eyes shut and gives himself a headache.

In the silence, finally, the stillness, at last, all he feels is a moment of relief, and then—nothing.

That man you want me to be, that man you think you know? I don’t remember how.

Mike looks up at the ceiling and lays his hands atop his chest.

Alright then. So who do you want to become?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Pet-Assisted Therapy](https://www.mountsinai.org/locations/mount-sinai/about/volunteer/patient) is a patient-related volunteer program at Mount Sinai Hospital.
> 
> “I’m Rachel Zane. I’ll be giving you your orientation.”  
> “Wow, you’re pretty.”  
> “Good. You’ve hit on me. We can get it out of the way that I am not interested.”  
> —Rachel and Mike, “[Pilot](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)” (s01e01)
> 
> Mike’s recall of the exchange is very close, but it’s not perfect. This has nothing to do with his eidetic memory, which relates to things he’s read as opposed to things he’s heard.


	8. Chapter 8

There’s no need, no particular reason for Mike to arrive fifteen minutes early to Group Therapy; even if Kaitlyn shows up early, which she won’t, it’s not as though there’s any extra work she can give him to get ahead, any extra credit he can earn to move to the head of the line. She might be impressed with his initiative, but it’s more likely that she won’t care; it doesn’t mean anything for his recovery, after all. It’s nothing she can put in her report.

He isn’t even the first one in the room.

Nicole looks up when he comes in, focusing on a spot about a foot off to the right of his face for a few seconds as he freezes where he stands.

“Mike,” she says atonally, her eyes skittering back to meet his.

He nods.

“Nicole.”

She drops her shoulders and tilts her head, and Mike walks around the table to sit across from her. Looking vaguely in her direction, he thinks about trying to start a conversation; they’ve never really had one before, but he catches her watching him from time to time.

Well, maybe Harvey will like it if he makes a new friend.

“You having memory problems or is it just me?”

She looks at him with a strangely curious expression, almost like she wants to laugh—or she thinks she should, anyway, but not enough to go through with it. To be fair, the question wasn’t exactly elegant, as icebreakers go, but there’s something about her quietude, her general shyness that tells him he’s better off getting right to the point. Anyway, if she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t have to answer; it’s not like he’s going to force her.

“I forgot everything from before the accident,” she says eventually.

Mike nods.

“Yeah.”

That’s how it goes.

Nicole looks down at her hands.

“I didn’t really,” she says next, and Mike leans forward in his chair. “I mean I did,” she rushes to correct herself, “I think I did, but I have these…pictures, and…ideas of stuff, and they feel like memories, but I don’t know if they are or I made them up and I just _think_ they really happened, because I don’t _remember_ making them up.”

Mike’s grip is feeble, his cards tipping forward obviously as Harvey studiously keeps his eyes on his own hand.

Mike pushes himself out of his wheelchair, demanding to be allowed to stand even though he knows he mustn’t.

Mike clings to his IV stand, trying to figure out how to bring it into the little bathroom when he can barely fit just his own body inside.

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

“I get it.”

Nicole rests her arms on the table and looks down at the crooks of her elbows.

“It’s just easier to tell everyone I don’t remember anything.”

Slipping down in his chair, Mike folds his arms above his stomach and turns his head to look at the back of the room. It’s a kindness to the others, really, to let them think such a thing; better than giving them false hope, better than stringing them along with the taunt that everything will come back someday, if everyone can just be patient.

Someday the charade will come to an end, of course, but not now. Not here at the start of all things, not when everyone is still figuring out what to do, what to say. How to feel.

“When are you going to tell them?”

“I’m not.”

But—what?

(And aren’t you the very same?)

Shifting around, sitting up straight and leaning forward, Mike thinks about secrets and uncertainties, about half-truths and misunderstandings, about cupcakes and frosting, and decides that he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

“Why?”

It’s better than nothing.

Nicole presses her right fingernails into her left knuckles and inspects the crescent-shaped indentations they leave behind. “My mom and dad keep telling me stories about things that happened when I was younger,” she says in a clipped sort of tone, “and they keep asking me if I remember them, and I don’t, but they like telling me about how much fun I had doing all these things, and it’s like…” She frowns thoughtfully, looking down at her hands.

Mike Ross is supposed to care that a little girl named Emma has died unexpectedly as the result of a sudden infection.

Mike Ross is supposed to be a man who other people can predict.

“It’s like they’re hoping I’ll remember everything the same way they do,” she says frustratedly. (Mike Ross is supposed to be a man whose heart breaks over and over for other people’s tragedies.) “They tell me about stuff that happened, and places we went, and that it’s such a happy memory and it was so great and I had so much fun.” She sniffles, and Mike wonders if she’s about to cry.

“My dad told me about this time when I was nine, and my parents took me to Disneyland,” she goes on without a trace of tears, “and he said I had never been to an amusement park before, but I’d always wanted to go to one, and he said I had a great time.”

Mike leans his elbow on the table and rests his chin in his hand.

“I don’t even know what I was supposed to be so happy about,” she says. “But then he said…it was too bad we did all that stuff when I was a kid, going on trips and vacations and stuff, that it was too bad it was such a waste of money because now I don’t remember any of it.”

Mike frowns and lifts his chin up off his hand.

Well, Harvey would never.

“I told him it wasn’t,” she says, “because even though I don’t remember it now, I probably liked it while I was there, and he laughed, and he said he was joking, and I don’t think he was trying to hurt my feelings, but, I…”

“It wasn’t a waste,” Mike assures her, having no real frame of reference to make such a claim.

“I don’t know why it made me so mad,” she goes on as though he hadn’t spoken. “It’s not like I care if I had fun or not, it happened a long time ago, but it felt like he was blaming me for forgetting?”

Didn’t it?

It isn’t his place to say.

Mike would say something more, maybe, change the subject, take them somewhere better, softer, kinder, except that the door opens and Kaitlyn walks in, cheerful as ever, smiling and greeting them both, and Nicole folds her arms and hunches over the table, and that’s the end of that. All in all, it’s just as well; Mike doesn’t know where they could’ve gone next other than down into a very deep hole.

_You did good, Mike._

His head falls back as he looks up at the ceiling. The air smells like…wood chips.

Then, for no obvious reason, it smells not so much like wood as like chlorine, like a swimming pool; then, for no particular reason, Mike folds his hands together and sets them on top of his head, and Kaitlyn puts a folder full of worksheets down on the table.

_You reached out and you grabbed my hand._

I want to become a man who knows where he belongs.

\---

Harvey’s waiting in the hall when the session finishes up, leaning against the wall across from the door with his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed on the line of patients walking out. Mike slips past one of the other men in the group and stops in front of him, scuffing the sole of his shoe along a crack in the linoleum.

“Ready to go?” Harvey asks, pushing himself off the wall to stand up straight, like he has some poise, like he knows what he’s doing.

Mike looks down at the floor, his vision slipping out of focus.

“Bye.”

Blinking rapidly, he lifts up and looks over his shoulder; Nicole looks back evenly for a few seconds before she walks off, the older woman at her side immediately beginning to talk as though Nicole is the only other person around for miles. Her mother, maybe. Probably. Mike nods after them.

“Yeah,” he says as Harvey tilts his head. “Let’s go.”

They walk side by side, Harvey still holding his hands behind him, and Mike thinks it wouldn’t be too bad if Harvey wanted to pat him on the back or put his arm around his shoulders.

“Was that Nicole?” Harvey asks as they near Mike’s room.

“Yeah,” Mike says, opening the door and stepping over the threshold. “We were talking before class started.”

Class. As if this is some sort of tedious obligation instead of an important part of his recovery process.

Harvey doesn’t make a point of it.

“Mm,” he murmurs. “Anything interesting?”

Mike shrugs. Nicole didn’t say anything about her confessions being secret.

“No.”

Still.

Harvey nods agreeably as Mike sits on the bed and looks up at him wistfully.

_Tell me what I know._

(I’ll tell you how I feel.)

“Anything you want to do today?” Harvey asks, standing with his hand on the chair beside the bed.

I want to stop forgetting.

Can you help me get to where I want to go?

Mike braces his hands on the edge of the mattress and grips tight.

“How did we meet?”

Harvey doesn’t say anything at first; Mike knows, somehow, in the back of his mind, he knows there’s a story, he knows the answer is more intricate than “I’m your boss, we met at work.” He knows it means something.

He didn’t know it would mean this much.

Sitting in the chair beside the bed, Harvey clasps his hands in his lap and smiles.

“It was back in twenty-eleven,” he begins. “I’d just been promoted to Senior Partner, and Jessica was making me hire myself an associate. I fought her on it,” he admits, “I didn’t want one, I said I didn’t need some Harvard clone weighing me down, but she wouldn’t let it slide, it was in the bylaws and I didn’t have a choice.”

Mike tries to remember going to Harvard and tells himself it doesn’t bother him that he can’t.

“So Donna and I are at the Chilton Hotel,” Harvey continues lightly, “and I’m running through these interviews, getting nowhere, bored out of my skull, and then you come in, and you introduce yourself, you tell me your name is Rick Sorkin— That’s the name of the kid who was supposed to show up for the ten o’clock spot, we never found out what happened to him, but you told Donna you were running from the cops, and I don’t know if she bought it or not, but for some reason, she let you in.”

“I was running from the cops?” Mike blurts out. Harvey chuckles quietly.

“I’m getting to it,” he assures him. “So you tell me your name’s Rick, and we’re on our way to the desk, you and me, to start the interview, and your briefcase pops open and nine plastic bags, absolutely full of pot, fall right out on the floor. _Nine_ bags.”

Mike grins. This story of Harvey’s, it’s a funny one; he likes these people, he likes the game they’re playing. He likes the risks they’re taking, he likes the places they’re going to go.

“And you sit down at the desk, across from me,” Harvey goes on, “and you tell me you’re there because you were making a drop for your buddy Trevor, but the drop was a set-up, you’d— When you were in elementary school, you said, you’d read this novel that was basically the same story, so you asked the cops what time it was to throw them off your trail and you remembered the sign you’d seen in the lobby, about our interviews, so you busted ass downstairs and you crashed our interviews and you told me…”

He trails off, and Mike leans forward as Harvey looks down at his knees.

“You told me your story,” he says.

Mike nods slowly. His story.

They’ll get back there, in time.


	9. Chapter 9

It was a good session this morning, Mike decides. Not that he made any specific progress, but Jason took him out into the rotunda to practice walking on an actual staircase, pacing up and down and trying not to lose his balance looking over the railing to the ground a full floor below. Not that it worked or anything, but failing at a new challenge instead of occasionally succeeding at an old one was kind of a nice change of pace.

Walking down the hall from the elevators back to his room, Mike tries not to look at his feet, and he reminds himself to swing his arms for balance even though it makes him feel like an idiot.

Double checking the number by the door, just to be sure, Mike places his hand on the knob and begins to turn it.

“I don’t care!”

Mike takes his hand off the knob and places it on the wall.

“You missed a meeting with a client, Harvey, this isn’t just some…side project anymore! It’s completely taking over your _life!_ ”

“This _is_ my life!”

Mike peeks in through the window, though he can’t see much beyond the curtain around the bed, and the curve of Donna’s back.

“Harvey,” Donna says coldly, “you are an adult, and you have a job, and responsibilities, and I know you feel guilty about all of this but you can’t just dedicate yourself to hanging around a hospital and _waiting._ I can’t keep covering for you, I can’t keep just-so-happening to move all your appointments to the other partners’ calendars and hoping they don’t notice.”

Light and shadow move in the folds of the curtain, and Mike figures he’s watching the silhouette of Harvey shaking his head.

“I never asked you to do that.”

“But _somebody_ has to! You don’t seem to understand how hard it is for me to keep picking up all your slack!”

“Donna! You, are not, a _lawyer!_ ”

“Don’t you think I know that? That’s exactly why all this work keeps piling up on your desk, because you keep forcing me to pass the buck and eventually it all comes back around to _you!_ ”

Crouching down, Mike presses his ear to the door below the small window, even though their shouting is coming through loud and clear without his having to bother; this way, at least they won’t be able to see him if they should happen to look in his direction.

“I can clean up my own goddamn messes.”

“So then why aren’t you?

Silence.

Mike rises up to peek through the window. Donna’s stepped back a bit, enough for him to see her clearly, standing with her arms crossed up high over her breast and a furious scowl darkening her face as she pins back the line of her shoulders; Harvey must still be there behind the curtain, but Mike can’t see any more than the faint blur of his shadow. Then Donna rears back, her neck stretching up, and Mike ducks back down.

“Mike’s gonna be back soon,” Harvey mutters. “I’ve gotta take him to his next appointment, you go back to work.”

Work?

Today must be a weekday.

“What appointment?” Donna challenges. Rising up just enough to make out Donna’s face, Mike wonders if Harvey’s lied about this sort of thing before.

“Irving says he’s ready to start meeting a psychologist one-on-one,” Harvey says, coming into view as Donna leans forward and sneers at him.

“I don’t suppose you’ve thought about making another appointment with _your_ psychologist.”

A scuffing sound makes Mike flinch back as Harvey freezes, his disbelieving glare fixed on the floor underneath his shoes. There’s a muffled slur as he says something too soft for Mike to catch through the door, but Donna’s mouth drops open and Mike ducks down again.

“It’s nothing to be _ashamed_ of, Harvey—”

“I said get the _fuck_ out of here!”

Tripping backwards, Mike stumbles into the wall just in time for Donna to stalk out with her head held up high, her sharply heeled shoes clicking pointedly as she struts down the hall, fists clenched tight at her sides. Still in Mike’s room, Harvey stands with his back to the door, looking out the window, or maybe not looking so much as trying to center himself, or catch his breath; Mike waits until some intangible trigger tells him that this has gone on quite long enough before he walks forward, his steps measured in floor tiles; two, four, six, eight. Nine.

Harvey startles as he draws near.

“Mike,” he says pleasantly, looking back over his shoulder. “How was PT this morning?”

“Fine,” Mike says reflexively.

Harvey smiles.

“You ready for your meeting with Doctor Zeigler?”

Mike only spares a moment trying to remember whether he’s heard the name before; another doctor, another appointment, it doesn’t really matter. He’ll suffer through it the same as all the others; Harvey’s putting in such an effort to help him, sacrificing so much of his time, so much of his energy, it’s the least he can do.

In the meantime, Harvey turns around, away from the window.

“Let’s go.”

Mike waits for Harvey to lead, following him out into the hall and off to the elevators. Harvey slips his hands into his pockets, and Mike carefully mimics the gesture.

Harvey presses the button for the fifth floor, and Mike looks down at the linoleum.

“What day is it?”

“Hm?” Harvey looks over at him, arching his eyebrows and thinning his lips. “Monday.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Mike scratches his fingernails against the fabric of his pants.

“You don’t have to be at work?”

The elevator doors open, and Harvey takes a loud breath in through his nose as he steps into the hall.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry. Harvey said so, and he won’t.

No, really.

Mike follows him down the hall to a cramped waiting room where a receptionist tucks her hair out of her face and smiles up at them.

“Mike Ross?” she inquires, and he looks at Harvey nervously.

“Yes,” Harvey intervenes, “he has an appointment at eleven with Doctor Zeigler.”

The receptionist nods cheerfully, still smiling up at them. “She’s ready for you, Mike, you can go on in.”

Mike looks back again, and Harvey pats him on the shoulder.

“I’ll be here when you’re done.”

No, really.

Mike smiles weakly.

“Okay.”

Turning away from Harvey’s solemn nod, he walks toward the closest of the three doors behind him and enters a small room, arranged to seem larger than it is with white furniture and a wide desk tucked away against the back wall. A large woman with kind eyes sits in an armchair across from a stiff-looking sofa, and she doesn’t stand when Mike comes in and closes the door.

“Hello,” she says, “I’m Doctor Zeigler; you can call me Mary. You’re Mike?”

He nods and sits on the sofa, pressed up against the armrest closest to the door.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Mike.”

“You too,” he says automatically, even though this is a waste of time, and she smiles and opens a notebook in her lap.

“So,” she begins warmly, reminding him more or less of one of those grandmotherly caricatures from old cartoons and such. “I know starting therapy can be scary, and you might feel like you don’t know where to begin, but I think the best thing to do is just to jump right into it; is there anything you want to talk about? Anything you think I should know?”

Mike tucks one of his legs up against his chest and leans back into the sofa cushions.

Harvey can clean up his own goddamn messes; he said so himself. His business isn’t Mike’s to tell.

“No.”

She nods to herself and makes a little mark in her notebook.

“That’s perfectly normal. So I know you’ve been with us since August,” she says soothingly, and a weird tension spreads in his chest at her gentle smile.

“Uh-huh,” he agrees, despite having no recollection of the last time he knew the date, or had a sense of his place in the timeline of his own life.

“Mm. And how are you feeling about all this?”

Guilty? Is it guilt he’s feeling?

Mike pulls his leg closer to his chest.

“I’m fine.”

He’s alive, is what he is. That’s what they like to remind him, anyway.

She nods slowly, narrowing her eyes just a bit at the corners.

“You know,” she recites, “most people in your situation feel some sort of way about what’s happening to them. They feel sad, or angry, and that’s okay, that’s perfectly normal; do you feel sad, Mike? Do you feel angry?”

Mike wonders where the intersection point lies of therapeutic empathy and overbearing condescension.

“Sad,” he invents after a pause that feels about the right length. Long enough, but not too much.

She nods, her eyes narrowed and her lips drawn tight.

“I see…”

Aren’t you going to tell me everything will get better? I just have to wait? I have friends and family supporting me, wanting the best for me, trying to help me? Doing whatever they have to do to keep me safe?

It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?

“So you’re feeling sad?” she mimics pointlessly. “What are you sad about? What’s making you sad, Mike?”

Mike shrugs, looking down at his hands clasped around his leg and pulled close to his chest as he tries to buy a little time.

“My fiancée hasn’t been here for a few days,” he realizes abruptly, and Doctor Zeigler nods some more.

“Do you have any idea why that might be?” she prods.

_Just tell me you feel something._

“No,” he says, except that that won’t do, that won’t do at all. “I mean, sort of,” he tries again. “She got mad at me when I asked her to leave me alone.”

“Mm,” she murmurs. “And why did you do that?”

He shouldn’t be mad; she’s only trying to help.

He isn’t. No, he isn’t.

Looking down, he hopes to hide his eyes, to hide any coldness she might see there, any disinterest. “I was tired,” he contrives. “She has to work really long hours, so she isn’t here very much, and when she comes, she likes to talk, a lot, but…she wants me to talk, too, she wants to have a conversation. But nothing really happens to me, so I don’t have a lot to say, and then she gets mad at me. So I just asked her to leave, so I could rest, but then she got mad that I was asking her to leave.”

Close enough.

Doctor Zeigler sketches a few quick lines in her notebook, her eyes darting from him to the page and back up, and he waits indifferently for her to finish. That was good, wasn’t it? That gave her something to sink her teeth into, something to help him figure out how to manage, or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing here.

“I see,” she says. “And do you have any idea why she was mad that you asked her to leave?”

But aren’t you supposed to be trying to help me? Aren’t you supposed to be the wise one between the two of us?

“No,” he says, already growing bored of the falsehood. “I mean, she wants me to talk, she asks me all these questions about my day, but nothing happens to me, so I don’t have anything to tell her, and then she gets mad at me for not having anything to say. She’s not mad at me, she’s mad about the—the circumstances.”

There’s nothing to it, it’s nothing special; she just wants everything to go back to the way it was before. What a surprising revelation that is, surely no one else is wishing the very same. Surely not all of us.

“She’s mad that her life isn’t what she thought it would be.”

Yeah. Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it.

And was that enough? Can I go now, am I finished? Am I self-aware?

“I’m sure she’ll be back,” Doctor Zeigler soothes, as though that’s all he has to be concerned about. “Now, our sessions might be a little different from the ones you’re used to with your other therapists; I know you’re used to meeting with them for a long time, an hour or so, but we find that when we’re staring out, patients usually do better with shorter sessions, half an hour or so so they don’t get too overwhelmed all at once. Do you understand?”

Mike inclines his head just enough to show that he does, just enough for her to read “Yes” as he clenches his fists and drives his nails into the flesh of his palms. She’s got enough to fill out her assessment, then? She won’t be fired on his account?

“Did you have any more questions before we stop for the day?”

You got what you came for?

“No thanks,” Mike says flatly, and Doctor Zeigler smiles.

“I hope you have a nice day, Mike.”

He waits just long enough for the silence to become awkward before he pushes off the stiff white sofa and slips out the door, into the cramped waiting room where Harvey sits with a magazine propped up on his crossed legs and looks up the moment Mike appears, dropping the magazine on the empty chair beside him as he stands eagerly.

“You ready to go?” he asks, having no sense at all of the time Mike’s just wasted.

Pausing for only an instant, Mike walks out the door into the hall; Harvey follows along without question, and Mike’s chest feels a little tight.

“Mike?”

Mike folds his arms over his ribs and looks down at the floor as he walks.

“How was it?”

“Stupid.”

Harvey quickens his pace to draw even with Mike, looking over at him pitifully.

“The receptionist told me these sessions might seem a little short at first—”

“I don’t like her.”

Harvey falters and drops back again.

“You don’t want to give her another chance?” he asks, hurrying to catch up. “You want me to see if I can set you up with longer sessions, maybe? She’s the head of the department, Doctor Irving thought she’d be the…the best choice.”

Mike bites the inside of his cheek. They’re all just trying to do their best to help, aren’t they? All trying to do the best they can with what they have. What little he’s got to offer.

“I…”

“I’ll talk to him,” Harvey interrupts. “We’ll get someone else, we’ll figure this out.”

Mike smiles tightly as his brain begins to race, and what a nostalgic old feeling this is; how strange that he hasn’t missed it before now.

No matter.

_We were both there when you woke up._

Above all else, Mike is Harvey’s priority.

_I cut out early on Thursday. Took a long weekend._

No one asked you to do that.

_I’m sorry, Mike._

It wasn’t your fault; no, I’m sure it was mine.

Mike winces.

“I’ll be okay,” he says firmly. “You shouldn’t be spending so much time here if you have other responsibilities, or, I mean, if you have to get back to work, I understand.”

For a moment, Harvey merely stares at him, paralyzed, horrified, and Mike drops his arms down to his sides, picking at the stiff fabric of his pants as the terrible expression crumples away in an instant and his lips curve into a reassuring smile.

“You just focus on your recovery,” he says. “That’s the most important thing. Don’t worry about me, I’ve got everything under control.”

Mike wonders if he should ask about the client meeting Harvey missed, or Donna’s fury over picking up after him, or how long all of this must have been going on, or how Harvey can stand to let his life, his real life, his own life slip away while Mike takes advantage of his friendship, his kindness, his commitment; his terribly misplaced guilt, his sense of obligation. He wonders if he should ask about all of that, if he should chase Harvey away for his own good and prepare for the inevitable, if he should step up and start relying on his own strength for once, his own sense of self.

He wonders if Harvey would go, if he asked.

“I’ll talk to Doctor Irving this afternoon,” Harvey says, “I’ll see if there’s someone else you can see.”

“I don’t need to see anyone,” Mike says, because if he can’t bring himself to make Harvey leave, at least he can make things that much easier for him. Even if it isn’t much, at least he can do that.

Harvey sighs.

“Mike,” he cautions, “I know it’s hard to admit you have problems you can’t handle all by yourself, but…take it from me, okay?” He looks up beseechingly, desolately, and Mike forces himself not to look away.

“You gotta stick with it.”

 _This_ is _my life._

Mike bites his tongue, and Harvey nods his encouragement.

“You know what, why don’t I see if Irving can get in touch with Adam and Mango, how about that?”

Pressing the button to summon the elevator, Mike looks out of the corner of his eye at Harvey’s hopeful smile, his refusal to stop trying, to walk away from this mess, and wishes he could do something, anything at all to make it all better, even just for awhile. There are no bluffs to be called here, though, no bigger guns in his arsenal. No one hundred and forty-six other things.

Mike slips his hands into his pockets and holds his shoulders back. He can take it; he’s strong enough. He’ll prove to all of them that Harvey isn’t throwing his life away trying to help him tough it out, one day at a time. Harvey won’t be defeated, won’t be ruined on his account.

He’ll earn the trust Harvey’s placed in him.

As long as it takes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “And what are your choices if someone puts a gun to your head?”  
> “What are you talking about? You do what they say, or they shoot you.”  
> “Wrong. You take the gun. Or you pull out a bigger one. Or you call their bluff. Or you do any one of 146 other things. If you can’t think for yourself, maybe you aren’t cut out for this.”  
> “No. I can and I am.”  
> …  
> “And it’s your job to do what I say when I say it. So if you’re talking about loyalty, you better goddamn earn it.”  
> “You’re right. I said I’m sorry, and I meant it. Harvey. I want you to trust— I need you to trust me. Okay? And I will work as hard as I can, as long as it takes, to make that happen.”  
> —Harvey and Mike, “[Errors and Omissions](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e02)” (s01e02)


	10. Chapter 10

Mike lies in bed and stares up at the ceiling and wonders what would be the best thing for whiling away the hours that remain between now (eight fifty-five) and group therapy (ten twenty). It’s not long; maybe he’ll read a book. Maybe he’ll watch television.

Then the door opens, and maybe he’ll do neither.

Stiletto heels click across the tile, muffled in the way that tells him his visitor is trying to hide her approach, probably to let him sleep, just in case that’s what he’s doing; maybe it’s Donna come to explain to him why Harvey won’t be back for awhile, or to apologize for anything he might have overheard yesterday. Maybe it’s Jessica come to tell him that she’s sorry, but there won’t be a spot for him back at the firm when he gets better—if he gets better, if he ever gets out of here. (No; “when,” it’ll be “when.”)

Then the curtain draws back, and maybe it’s neither.

Rachel peers around the corner with a tremulous smile on her face and her eyebrows raised inquiringly.

“Hey,” she murmurs as he turns his eyes to her. “How are you doing?”

The funny thing is, he can’t remember saying he wanted to see her again.

_I’ll be back later._

Shouldn’t have left that one hanging, Mister Lawyer Man.

Turning his head toward the window, he looks out on at the dismal grey atmosphere and presses his molars together for a couple of seconds.

“Getting better.”

So take that.

She steps closer, edging around to the chair at the side of the bed as though she knows she won’t be welcome, sitting as though she doesn’t care.

“I’m really happy to hear that.”

He jerks his shoulder in a shrugging sort of motion, and she keeps on smiling.

“I’ve really missed you.”

I’ve been right here.

No. That won’t help anything; she’s trying her best.

“You too.”

Liar.

She smiles, and that was good. That was the right thing to say.

“I’ve got a client meeting nearby in about an hour,” she explains, “I thought I’d leave the office a little early so I could come by and see you.” She smiles over a breathy sort of laugh, looking away primly; “I was thinking, maybe I should start coming by here more often.”

Please. Go away.

Please.

“Why?”

Her giggle has an incredulousness to it, as though she thinks he’s kidding, and he turns his head to look at her as he tries not to seem too disgusted.

“‘Why?’” she parrots. “You’re my fiancé and I love you, why wouldn’t I want to be with you as much as I can?”

“I’m not too much of a stranger?”

Oops. Shouldn’t’ve gone there.

Oh, well; no takebacks.

She sighs, lowering her gaze and twisting her fingers together, and then looking up at him with a pointedness that tells him she would have started the gesture over if he hadn’t seen it the first time around.

“I love you,” she repeats. “I want to be with you. Whatever that means.”

You sure about that?

No, that’s not fair; he should give her another chance. (How many will that make?)

“I’m seeing a psychologist,” he says, just to see what will happen.

“Oh,” she says immediately, though whether she’s startled by the subject change or the mere fact of the thing, he can’t be sure. Taking a moment to compose herself, she leans forward and smiles again, folding her hands in her lap, and he knows she’s started driving him down the road to becoming more of an object than a person.

“That’s great.”

Are you sure about that?

“I don’t like her.”

Rachel’s smile doesn’t fall so much as freeze in place; she wasn’t expecting that, wasn’t expecting any of this, doesn’t know what to do, what to say, how to act, how to move. What to think. How to feel.

No shit.

“If the doctors think you should talk to her, it’s probably a good idea,” she fumbles, trying to regain her bearings.

Do as you’re told, Michael; we know what’s best for you, Michael. We know you better than you know yourself. We’ll show you who you are, and who you should be.

“Our next session’s on Thursday.”

She sighs her relief, leaning back in her chair, and he stares up at the ceiling.

“I’m sure it’ll help,” she decides. “It’s good for you, even if you can’t see it yet.”

He curls his lip in a disdainful sneer, and she smiles again.

“What do you want to do before therapy today?” she asks, and is that as far as they’re going to go? Is that the end of things? That’s as much effort as she’s going to put into understanding what he’s going through, that’s as close as he’s going to get to an apology?

“I love you,” that’s supposed to be enough.

Bullshit.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Nothing.”

She nods slowly, looking down at her shoes.

“How about we just talk?”

Mike looks at the clock on the bedside table; forty-five minutes to go.

“I want to watch TV.”

“Okay,” she says eagerly, standing and reaching out for the remote. Mike nestles against the pillows at his back and feels himself losing focus already.

He would’ve gotten it, if she’d just given him a minute.

\---

The sky is clear in the morning, light spilling in through the window thanks to some combination of the angle of the sun in the sky and reflection off the glass in the buildings across the way, and Mike tries to remember if Wednesday actually happened or he somehow managed to discover the secret of time travel without realizing it. That would certainly explain a lot, although to be fair, it would probably raise more questions than it answered.

More likely than not, he’s just losing his mind.

No. No, that’s not it, that’s backwards; he’s recovering, that’s it. Harvey said so. He’s doing better, he’s doing fantastic; he’s the miracle man.

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

(Come back later and we can decorate them.)

Mike presses his palms down into his eyes and clenches his teeth.

“Mister Ross?”

Lowering his hands, Mike sits up against his pillows as a nurse he vaguely recognizes steps around the curtain into view and smiles at him.

“Hi, I’m here to take you upstairs for your appointment with Doctor Zeigler.”

Mike nods and slips on his soft shoes, following her out into the hall and over to the elevators. He’s not a child or anything, it’s just that it’s for the best that he isn’t left alone to navigate himself around; he’d get lost, probably, and be late for all his sessions, and it would just screw up everyone’s schedule for the rest of the day.

It’s good that Harvey isn’t here to take him. It is. He’s busy, he’s got his life to live; he’s got a job, and responsibilities, and meetings with clients that he can’t keep missing. He’s got everything under control, and if Mike is getting better, which he _is,_ he can’t expect Harvey to keep doting on him forever. It’s just what he wanted, anyway; Harvey’s taking time for himself, and Mike didn’t even have to ask him to do it.

Up on the fifth floor, Mike walks into the cramped waiting room, leaving the nurse to go back to whatever more important things she has to deal with today than playing chaperone to a grown man who ought to be able to manage at least that much on his own by now, and the receptionist looks up with a cheerful smile as he takes a breath and steps up to the desk.

“Hi, Mike,” she greets him. “You can go right on in, she’s ready for you.”

“Thanks.”

The door’s already open a crack, and Mike pushes it in without bothering to knock or anything, shutting it behind him as Doctor Zeigler smiles and opens her notebook to a page already half-filled.

“Good morning, Mike,” she says as he sits. “So last time we talked a little more about your relationship with Rachel, that you’re having some trouble relating to her and you said you were…” she glances down at her notes, “annoyed that she isn’t more sympathetic to your situation?”

“Uh-huh,” he agrees, taking her word for a conversation he can’t remember a moment of.

“Mm,” she murmurs, “so today the first thing I want to ask you is why you think she’s having this trouble, if there’s anything you might be doing to shut her out, or make it harder for her to get close to you.”

Let’s list the top five ways this is all your fault.

Mike frowns and tucks his leg up close to his chest.

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “She won’t tell me what her problem is, everything’s always just about how all the doctors are right all the time, I should listen to everything they say, I should follow all the directions, and then she gets pissed that she doesn’t know when I’m going to get better and go home.”

“And why do you think that is,” Doctor Zeigler says in such a way that Mike knows she has an answer in mind, that she won’t let this drop until he gives it to her, word for word.

“She’s frustrated,” he guesses, and she nods, and that’s on the right track, but she won’t let him off so easily.

Follow the logic train, Mike, it’s not that hard.

“She’s angry that I’m doing everything the doctors tell me, but I’m still not the person she wants me to be.”

Doctor Zeigler smiles beatifically, and Mike wonders if he’s going to get a gold star for his performance.

“That’s very insightful,” she commends, as though it wasn’t her idea to begin with. “So now, keeping that information in the back of your mind, knowing that, is there anything you think you could be doing to help her? What actions do you think you could be undertaking that might help her connect with you, that might make it easier to see where you’re coming from?”

Mike glowers at the sofa cushions and wonders just when it became his job to serve as chair of the Rachel Zane Support Group, how it might’ve slipped his mind or evaded his notice that he’d been assigned to the position. When it might’ve become his responsibility to make sure his injury wasn’t inconveniencing the people he’s supposed to love, who are supposed to love him, who aren’t supposed to feel contractually obligated to worry about him, to waste their time waiting on his body to fix itself.

Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit.

“Maybe she could be trying a little harder to understand why I’m _not_ that person,” he grumbles petulantly.

Doctor Zeigler sighs.

“This is a very hard thing for her to be going through,” she warns, “and if you want to keep her in your life, don’t you think it’s a good idea to try to meet her where she is? Try to understand her perspective, understand how suddenly she’s lost someone close to her. You’ve said you’re feeling sad, and angry, well, Mike, those are perfectly normal emotions for people involved in situations like this, but do you understand that they’re normal for _everyone_ involved? Not just the person who’s been hurt, but everyone around them, everyone who’s supporting them. You need their support, but they all need yours, too.”

You’re making grown-up decisions now, Michael, you’d better be ready for them.

“What if I _don’t_ want her?”

“Don’t you?”

Does he?

Sagging into the cushions, Mike drops his leg back to the floor and his arm across the back of the sofa. He does want her. He _does._ It’s just…

“Mike,” Doctor Zeigler interrupts his thoughts, “I think you still need Rachel to be your friend, to be your partner, but you’re having some trouble understanding each other because, when it comes right down to it, at the end of the day, the two of you want the same thing; you both want everything to go back to normal, you want everything to be the way it was before. But you’re not communicating that to each other, and maybe you need to take the first step and let her know how you feel.”

How I feel.

How _I_ feel.

“No,” he says firmly, straightening his spine and setting his hands down on his knees. “That’s not how I feel, that’s not what I want. That’s what _she_ wants.”

Doctor Zeigler furrows her brow, her eyes narrowing slightly as she looks up from her stupid notebook. “You don’t want your life to go back to normal?”

“I don’t need my life to be the same,” he spells out. “I need to get better, I need to get the fuck out of here, but I’m _not_ the same person and I don’t want everyone I know to spend the rest of my life treating me like they’re waiting for me to _become_ that person, I don’t— That’s not me getting better, that’s me just—doing whatever the hell I’m told!”

“Watch your language, please.”

He rolls his eyes, and she makes another note.

“Have you discussed any of this with Rachel?” she asks after a moment. “Does she know you feel this way?”

Tightening his mouth, pinching his lips together, he glares out the window.

“Yes,” he spits. “She doesn’t believe me, she just says it’s hard on her that I’m not the same person.” He sniffs derisively, and Doctor Zeigler tilts her head. “She wants to help me get back to being like I used to be.”

“And you’re refusing to let her?”

“Because that’s not what I _want!_ ”

“And what _do_ you want?”

Mike throws his hands into the air. “I don’t know,” he exclaims, “maybe for her to understand that I was hit by a car? Maybe for her to actually get that _I_ almost died instead of just— _saying_ it all the time like it’s something that only happened to _her?_ ”

The ensuing silence breaks with the sound of his labored breathing, and Doctor Zeigler watches patiently, waiting for him to calm down before she elects to respond. To validate his rage, to say that she understands where he’s coming from, what he’s going through. It must have been hard to bottle all that up for so long.

She crosses her legs and closes the notebook in her lap.

“Maybe it’s about time you started taking some responsibility for how you’re treating her.”

Maybe you haven’t noticed how you’re doing everything wrong.

_Maybe you should blame yourself._

Maybe you should shut the hell up.

Mike glares so hard that his forehead begins to ache.

“Are you speaking from personal experience or what?” he snaps, and Doctor Zeigler sets her notebook down on the desk.

“We’re not here to talk about me,” she reminds him.

“Apparently we’re not here to talk about me, either,” he cuts in before she can claim the point. Instead, she merely purses her lips, drawing her hand back toward her chest as though she’s given up on a snap decision to reach out for him.

Good call on that one.

She takes a measured breath and closes her eyes.

“Mike,” she says warningly. “I realize these are difficult matters to discuss. It’s never easy to face up to one’s own shortcomings, or…weaknesses. But for Rachel’s sake, and for yours, and for the sake of your relationship, it is important that we not let this friction between you be swept under the rug.” She levels him with a cold stare. “Do you understand?”

Mike scoffs.

“This isn’t working out.”

“Mike, I realize this is difficult—”

“No,” he interrupts, “you don’t. You think you do, but you don’t know what I’m going through, you don’t know what it’s like. Harvey’s right,” he realizes then, smacking his hands down on the sofa and standing abruptly, “I do need to talk about my shit, but I sure as hell don’t need to do it with someone whose first priority is making sure my girlfriend and I stay together long enough to get married instead of, I don’t know, helping _me_ get better.”

Doctor Zeigler looks up at Mike calculatingly, and he tries not to sneer at her obvious indifference.

Has it been half an hour yet? Are we all better now?

Reaching for her notebook again, Doctor Zeigler opens it to some page near the end and writes only a few quick words before she closes it again, setting it back down and standing up.

“I don’t think this is going to work out.”

No shit.

Shaking his head, Mike turns to go, and she waits until he has his hand on the knob before she concludes her point:

“As the head of this department, it remains my obligation to insure ensure that you have access to a mental health professional better suited to your…therapeutic style. I will be making my recommendations to Doctor Irving, and he’ll let you know when a satisfactory solution has been reached.”

Mike clenches his teeth.

“Fine.”

“Mister Ross,” she carries on haughtily, “I strongly advise you to make an effort to work _with_ your next therapist and not _against_ them. I assure you we are all here trying to help you. Even if you can’t see it.”

Mike tightens his grip around the knob and tenses his shoulders.

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Of course.”

Pausing another few seconds, just in case she has something more to add, he steps out into the waiting area, making a conscious effort not to slam the door behind him.

So that’s that.

As he walks down the hall to the elevators, Mike tries to remember the secret of time travel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The white ones are best.”  
> “You’re just here to make me go in.”  
> “I am. Because sometimes we make choices we’re not old enough to make, and then we regret them. I don’t want that to happen to you.”  
> —Father Walker and Mike, “[Faith](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s05e10)” (s05e10)
> 
> “Trevor came to see me six months ago.”  
> “Yeah, I know that.”  
> “Yeah, but you didn’t know he spent most of that time talking about you or the fact that he blames himself for everything that happened to you.”  
> “Well, maybe he should.”  
> “Maybe you should blame yourself.”  
> —Father Walker and Mike, “Faith”
> 
> Doctor Zeigler is a mild satire of Doctor Agard and Father Walker. That is, seemingly well-intentioned but also a Very Bad counselor.


	11. Chapter 11

It’s Friday, today.

It’s been exactly one week and one day since Mike’s last session with Doctor Zeigler, who promised to speak to Doctor Irving about setting him up with a new psychologist, and it doesn’t much surprise Mike that he hasn’t heard anything from either of them, being that Doctor Zeigler seemed somewhat offended at their differences of opinion about his mental health and wellbeing and she strikes him as the type to bear grudges for stupid reasons. He supposes he ought to thank her, in a way, for giving him a touchstone to help remember what day it is—Thursday plus eight—but in the long run, it probably isn’t worth it.

Turning over in bed, Mike sets his hand down on the side table, panicking for an instant when he doesn’t find a book there until he remembers that he finished _And Then There Were None_ two days ago, and Rachel took it back home with her after apologizing for forgetting to bring him a replacement and promising instead to bring one the next time she comes by. He thinks about turning the television on, but even just the idea of that makes him feel indolent, which he doesn’t care for much at all.

More or less the moment he resigns himself to lying still and counting down the minutes until Physical Therapy (one hundred and twenty-six), a gentle knock sounds at the door before it opens with a click, and he knows without knowing how that it’s Harvey come to see him. Harvey, who has clients he’s been neglecting, and meetings he’s missed, and work that’s piled up on his desk, and who hasn’t been to see Mike in nearly two weeks, and Mike tries not to feel guilty about the relief he feels that he’s stopped by, even though he should probably still be at work at this hour, on a Friday.

Harvey peers around the curtain with the same caution Mike’s visitors usually exhibit, though there’s none of Rachel’s trepidation in his gentle smile and kind eyes; none of Donna’s daintiness in the way he steps forward, none of Jessica’s uncertainty in his comfortable posture. For an instant, Mike loves him utterly, unconditionally.

“Hey,” Harvey says, slipping his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “How’re you feeling?”

Mike looks up at him thoughtfully. He’s got clients he’s neglecting, and meetings he’s missing, and work that’s piling up on his desk, and he hasn’t been to visit in nearly two weeks.

That’s enough of your vanity, Michael.

“I’m not seeing Doctor Zeigler anymore,” he says with an indifference he hopes masks his sudden nerves. Harvey nods with a sour grimace.

“I heard about that,” he says. “I’m sorry, Mike; I tried to talk to Doctor Irving after your first session, but he said Zeigler wanted to keep working with you, and he figured she knew what she was talking about.”

“I bet,” Mike says wryly, except that Harvey lowers his eyes shamefully and shakes his head, and no, no, he was just trying to make a joke; it was funny, wasn’t it? A little bit?

“Harvey—”

“We found someone else,” Harvey hurries on, looking up a little plaintively, and Mike wasn’t harboring any resentment or anything, but he forgives him all the same. “Doctor Andrews, she has a private practice, but she’s here twice a week, and she can come in for emergencies. I met her, I think—I think you’ll like her.”

Mike smiles.

“Thank you.”

An unpleasant blend of relief and remorse colors Harvey’s expression, and Mike wonders if there’s anything he can say to comfort him, to convince him that everything’s going to be alright.

It will, of course; that goes without saying.

Harvey will fix it.

Mike’s smile dims slightly as Harvey clears his throat, taking his hands out of his pockets without seeming to know quite what to do with them instead.

“You have an appointment with Doctor Andrews on Monday,” he says then. “Eleven o’clock. I’ll, I’ll—uh, I’ll…try to be here.”

Mike nods. He’ll work hard, he’ll do the best that he can; Harvey needs this, too, after all, and he deserves a little return on his investment.

“Okay.”

A certain heaviness in the air dissolves as Harvey drops his shoulders forward, folding his arms across his chest and appearing somehow five years younger, smaller, shyer. Lonelier.

Mike tries to smile for him.

“So,” Harvey says abruptly, lowering his arms and raising his head, “I ran into Adam downstairs. Adam and Mango, remember them, he uh, he said they’d be around for awhile if you wanted to say hi.”

Volunteers with the Pet Assisted Therapy program. Mango is a border collie. Very friendly.

“Now?” Mike asks, his good faith effort at conveying hopefulness coming out disgustingly closer to apprehension and making Harvey’s face fall, just a bit.

“We don’t have to,” Harvey assures him. “I know you’ve got PT this morning, we could just stay here until then, if you want.”

Mike looks down at the blanket pulled taut across his legs. Stay here? They could; it might be nice, just sitting and talking. They could play cards, or watch TV. Mike could read, if Harvey brought a book; he’s gotten much better since they started all this, hasn’t he? His diction and such. Harvey will be proud.

No. No, Harvey went out of his way to get Adam and Mango here in the first place; he saw a poster downstairs, he thought it would be fun. He was only trying to help.

“They’re here now?” he prods, looking up again.

Harvey nods eagerly, his posture twitching back as though he’s just barely stopped himself from dashing off to find them again. “They are,” he says, “they should be outside; I can run down and check, if you want, I can see about you going out without a wheelchair this time, or, or maybe you can meet them in here, somewhere, there might be a…a room for these things.”

Mike smiles softly.

“Let’s do that.”

Yes; Harvey can fix anything.

\---

It’s Monday, today.

Mike’s first appointment with Doctor Andrews is in about an hour. It doesn’t look like Harvey’s going to make it in time, but that’s okay; Mike doesn’t need a chaperone. He’s an adult; he can walk himself to…wherever. The fifth floor, probably. There’ll be someone up there he can ask. Maybe that nurse will be by again to bring him upstairs. Whatever happens, it’ll all work out.

Turning his head, Mike glances over at the clock. Oh; look at that, it’s already ten forty-one. His appointment is at eleven, Harvey said. Maybe he should just go, give himself some time to get lost. Or maybe he should wait, just in case that nurse is going to come back.

A loud ringing that reminds him of a fire drill begins to sound suddenly, off to the left. He has a phone? Yes, look at that, the off-white box behind the clock. No one’s ever called before; did he even know it was there? Yes, he must have; yes, he did. He always thought it was some kind of intercom, a direct line to the front desk. An emergency buzzer.

The box rings again, and Mike reaches out to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?” he asks, lying flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

“Mike,” Harvey says, bright but a little thin, like he hasn’t gotten much sleep lately and probably doesn’t have time to be having this conversation in the first place even though he’s the one who called. Mike grins immediately, stifling it the moment he realizes that Harvey hasn’t been sleeping for a reason, and that reason probably has a lot to do with him.

We never asked for any of this.

None of us.

But what are we supposed to do now that we’ve got it?

“I’m sorry I can’t be there.”

After all this, he’s sorry he hasn’t done more. Mike shakes his head back and forth across the pillow.

“Don’t worry about it,” he dismisses. “Thanks for calling.”

Harvey sighs, putting a hollow feeling in Mike’s chest as he imagines him massaging his forehead with his fingertips.

“I thought I’d be able to get away for an hour, but we’ve been swamped since Soloff resigned.”

Who did what?

_Mike, Soloff hates me, there’s no way he’ll work with us on this._

Oh, right. That guy.

Mike props his arm up and leans on it. “Soloff resigned?”

“Shit,” Harvey bites out, “I’m sorry, Mike, Jack Soloff was the head of our firm’s compensation committee, he—he uh…” Harvey clears his throat. “He went head-to-head with Jessica a few times, I guess he’s not comfortable here anymore.”

Mike drops his arm and curls it underneath his head. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Mike smiles to himself.

“Thanks for calling.”

“I wanted to make sure you knew I was thinking about you,” Harvey insists. “I think this time’ll go better than that shit with Zeigler, just—just answer Doctor Andrews’ questions as best you can, be honest with her, and you don’t have to tell her everything right away but I don’t want you to be afraid to open up to her, alright, I really think she knows what she’s doing and if you two get along, if you—if you can…connect with her, I’m sure she’ll be able to help, I think you’ll… I think you’ll really get something out of this. I hope you will. I hope you like her.”

He’s trying so hard.

Mike lowers his arm and curls up on his side. “Don’t worry, I’ll do my best.”

Harvey laughs quietly. “Yeah. I know you will. Alright, rookie,” he says on a sigh, “I’ve got a meeting I’ve gotta get to, but I’ll come visit as soon as I can, I want to hear all about your first session. I mean,” he stutters, “anything you want to tell me, I want to hear it, I’m not—I’m not asking you to tell me anything you want to keep private, between the two of you, I just… I hope you like her.”

“Me too.” Mike picks at the sheets with his nails. “Thanks, Harvey.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“I know.”

With one last contented hum, Harvey hangs up the call, and Mike gives himself a moment to pause with the phone cradled to his ear before he hangs it up again and peers at the clock.

Six minutes.

The door opens with a click.

“Mister Ross?”

Okay. Here we go.

The nurse brings Mike up to the fifth floor, to the same cramped waiting room where he met with Doctor Zeigler, the same receptionist smiling cheerfully as Mike slips his left hand into his pocket and tries to remember to keep his shoulders back and his posture straight.

“It’s the last door there, on your right,” the receptionist says, nodding toward the back corner. “You can go ahead and knock, she should be waiting for you.”

Nodding, Mike sighs, takes a breath, and raps his knuckles on the glass.

“Come in,” a weirdly high-pitched voice calls, so Mike opens the door.

A dark-haired woman sits behind a desk in the corner of the room, looking up from her laptop and smiling kindly with just the smallest bit of hesitation as Mike looks around at the green sofa to his left, the bookcase in the corner beside the window. The woman—Doctor Andrews stands, stepping around the desk, and the first thing Mike notices is that she isn’t holding a notebook in her hands.

“Mike,” she says warmly, and her voice is as high-pitched as he thought but seems somehow less jarring now that it’s no longer disembodied. “My name is Shay Andrews; you can call me Doctor Andrews, or Shay, whatever makes you comfortable.”

He glances down at her, scratching the jut of his hip. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She smiles. “Would you like to sit down?”

Might as well. She waits for him to take his place on the sofa, and takes hers back at the desk chair; he doesn’t mind it, somehow. He knows she’s paying attention.

“So, Mike,” Doctor Andrews says, resting her arms on her desk and leaning forward. “How are you doing?”

He sniffs, a weak facsimile of a laugh. “I’m here,” he says drolly.

She smiles. “You are,” she agrees. “I take it you don’t especially want to be?”

_You gotta stick with it._

Yeah. Yeah, he knows.

“I need help.”

“Mm.” She looks at him carefully. “Do you want it?”

Off to his right, tossed up against the armrest is a dirty stuffed dog—no, not dirty, just old. Worn. It looks soft, and Mike reaches for it, cradling it in his lap.

Does he want it?

He rubs the dog’s downy ears between his fingers.

“I want to get better.”

Doctor Andrews takes her arms off her desk and sets her hands in her lap.

“You’ve made a lot of progress so far,” she says. “I’ve read your file, it’s very impressive; but it sounds like you think you’ve still got a ways to go, so I wonder, what does it mean to you? Getting better. What does that look like?”

Mike hugs the dog to his chest.

Who can say?

“I don’t know,” he says, aware he’s being standoffish and telling himself it’s some kind of test for the good doctor instead of a secret admission that would sound a lot more terrified if he was being honest with himself, and with her.

She nods, and he has to admit, she’s doing pretty well.

“Okay,” she says thoughtfully. “It’s kind of a weird thing to think about in your spare time, I can understand you not having a clear image of that right now. That’s alright, we can figure it out as we go.”

Mike smiles, and Doctor Andrews smiles back, and yeah, he can see why Harvey thought this would be a good idea.

“So I have some things I’d like to discuss with you,” she says, turning her chair just a bit closer to facing him, “but is there anything in particular you want to talk about first?”

Will anything I say be held against me in a court of law?

He shrugs, and she nods again.

“If you think of anything later on, just say so,” she advises. “But for now, I want to ask you about your support network, any friends or family you have around helping you out, who might be coming around to visit you.”

Just for a second, his gaze darts off to the side, to the floor, and he hugs the dog tighter as he wonders what she’s going to make of that.

Except that she doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t do anything but wait, and he wonders if maybe she really is going to take him at his word.

“My fiancée,” he lists. “My boss. Some of my coworkers. I think my boss’s boss was here once.”

“Your fiancée?” she repeats with a smile. “That’s nice; how long have the two of you been engaged?”

“About a year,” he says quickly. “I don’t remember, I don’t… I don’t feel time the right way anymore.”

She raises her eyebrows a little, resting her arm on the desk before her and letting her hand droop over the side. “What do you mean?”

He scowls, but, well, it’s not like it’s a secret.

“I don’t remember how long ago things happened,” he tries. “Everything I remember happened in the past, but…that’s it, it’s all just ‘back there.’ Two days ago feels the same as two months ago.”

She nods, and she doesn’t seem particularly surprised, and she doesn’t seem to think it’s particularly weird, and he shifts the dog into just his right arm.

“And I don’t feel anything about the future,” he goes on, easier now that he knows he won’t be judged, the words coming to him reflexively as he speaks them into the patient silence. “I know I’m going to get out of here eventually, I know I’m going to be discharged, eventually, but I’m not looking forward to it, I’m not… _excited_ about it. It’s like I don’t really care, like if it happens it happens, and it…” He pinches his lips, his eyes drifting off to the side as he tries to come up with the words.

“It’s just…whatever.” He shrugs. “It is what it is.”

Doctor Andrews hums softly, and Mike tries not to feel defensive in advance.

“And how’ve you been dealing with that?” she asks, which is good of her in that it’s a lot better than “How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t exactly need to keep track of that kind of stuff,” he says. “While I’m here. It’s fine. I mean it’s confusing, I guess, but it doesn’t really matter.”

“It doesn’t matter to you how long you and your fiancée have been engaged?”

He shrugs and crosses his arms as the dog falls to his lap. “We’re engaged now, who cares how long it’s been?”

Doctor Andrews smiles. “Your fiancée might.”

“Yeah,” Mike snaps instantly, “well, she can just get over it.”

Oh dear. Didn’t mean to say that.

Mike braces himself for the self-righteous argument that he needs to reach out to Rachel, that he needs to meet her where she is, understand her sorrow, her anger, her frustration, see things through _her_ eyes, understand _her_ perspective, walk this tragedy in _her_ shoes. Be the bigger person, Michael, be the stronger man.

Doctor Andrews stops smiling, and Mike grits his teeth.

“You mentioned that your boss is visiting you,” she says after a moment. Mike startles, but she takes it in stride: “Is he putting a lot of pressure on you? Does he understand the situation?”

_Rachel and I switched off staying at the hospital with you._

Does Harvey understand everything he’s going through?

_We were both there when you woke up._

The question should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?

Mike nods and stops clenching his jaw.

“He’s helping me a lot,” he says. And maybe she doesn’t understand this part, maybe it’s a little unusual, so he should let her know: “He’s my best friend.”

Is he?

_You told me your story._

His story that ended when he met Harvey. His story that started a new chapter that day, that turned to a new page the moment he tripped into that hotel room.

_This IS my life!_

His story that became Harvey’s story.

Doctor Andrews sits back in her chair and nods.

“I think you’re pretty lucky to have two people in your life who care so much about you,” she muses, which Mike supposes is a good point. “Has it been helpful for you to talk to them?”

Well? Hasn’t it?

Have you enjoyed being blamed for things being the way they are? Has it helped you to sit back and watch everyone tiptoe over eggshells and across shards of glass as they try to figure out what to say to you? What not to say? How to act, how to look, how to move, how to sound? Has that been _good_ for you, Michael, has that been _nice?_

“Sort of,” he mutters.

Doctor Andrews waits. Mike does, too, until the silence becomes too stiff.

“Rachel gets mad whenever I act different,” he says, already sick of this story but not sure how else to put it, what other words he can use to make her understand. “She keeps treating me like I should’ve woken up exactly the same person I was when I got hit, like she forgets that I’m not just here for fun, it’s not like I have to serve out a sentence to make sure I’ve been quarantined long enough to be released back into society. She just wants me to be back to normal already.”

Doctor Andrews hums softly. “And what about your boss?” she asks. “Is he the same?”

_You just focus on your recovery._

Mike gathers the dog into his arms.

“He wants me to get better,” he says. “But it’s not the same.”

She waits a moment, until the silence becomes too long.

“How so?”

How so.

Mike rubs the dog’s downy ears between his fingers.

“Whenever Rachel visits,” he ventures, “she just treats me like I’m the same person, but… I don’t know, like I have a fever or something and she’s visiting me while I’m home sick from work. And then she’s all frustrated when I don’t act the way she thinks I should. But when Harvey’s here,” he goes on, hearing the uptick in his voice and doing nothing to quash it, “he just wants to make sure I’m doing okay with all my therapy. He asks me if I’m making progress, and if I feel like I’ve got everything I need. If everyone’s treating me okay.”

She smiles at his enthusiasm, and he tries to school his expression, even though it’s much too late for it to matter.

“But he was talking to his secretary a few days ago,” he goes on abruptly, somehow unable to stop himself even though he probably shouldn’t be saying such things as this, shouldn’t be repeating things he overheard, things that were said in confidence. “She says he’s spending too much time on me, and she has to cover for him at work. She says he feels guilty that I’m here,” he remembers suddenly, “but he’s… She said work is piling up on his desk, because he’s hanging around here. Waiting.”

And when we’re all looking for someone to blame, I know the war will start at my doorstep.

Mike sets the dog down on his lap and pets down its back, and Doctor Andrews gives him a moment to catch his breath.

“She thinks he feels guilty?” she asks. Mike shrugs.

“That’s what she said.”

Doctor Andrews sets her hand on top of her desk. “Do you have any idea why she would think something like that?”

Now that you mention it…

“Not really.”

Her eyebrows quirk up for a second.

“Maybe that’s something you want to talk to him about.”

_Alright, rookie._

Mike nods to himself as Harvey’s presence, the memory of him and all his well wishes and good intentions creeps in under Mike’s skin and warms him from the inside out.

This is something worth fighting for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “That’s enough of the vanity, okay, Michael.”  
> —Father Walker, “[Faith](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s05e10)” (s05e10)
> 
> “Mike, there is no way that Soloff will work with us on this. He hates me.”  
> —Louis, “[Privilege](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s05e06)” (s05e06)
> 
> As before, Mike’s imperfect recollection of this event has nothing to do with his eidetic memory, which relates to the written word, not aural recall.
> 
> “What makes you think I’m not fighting for you?”  
> “Mm, I don’t know. Your career, my—anything?”  
> “Oh, you got a lot of nerve. You have no idea what I’ve been doing for you.”  
> —Harvey and Mike, “[She Knows](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s02e01)” (s02e01)
> 
> Mike proposes to Rachel in “Not Just a Pretty Face” (s04e16).
> 
> Christie, A. (1939). _And Then There Were None_. United Kingdom: Collins Crime Club.


	12. Chapter 12

Mike sits in bed, as he does every morning, cradling his legs close to his chest, as he does some mornings, and waits for somebody to tell him what to do, as he does on the mornings when he wakes to an empty room, which, to be fair, is most of them, these days.

Out of the corner of his eye, trying to look without looking, as though there’s anyone here to impress, he watches the phone, wishing as hard as he can that it’ll ring, yeah, sure, why not, that might be nice. Maybe Harvey will call; maybe Harvey will ask him how things went with Doctor Andrews, maybe Harvey will say “Hey, Mike, let’s talk for awhile.”

Might be nice.

Mike drops his legs and falls into the pillows at his back. What’s Harvey’s phone number? Does he know it? Did he ever? He must have, certainly, at some point. But Harvey’s so busy nowadays, balancing so much in his life; the last thing he needs is for Mike to call out of the blue, for Mike to make him feel _guilty._ And for what? All he’s done? The fact that it isn’t more? That’s ridiculous, Harvey’s done everything for him. Everything he had any right to ask, and then ten times that, just for good measure.

_Maybe that’s something to talk to him about._

There’s a thought.

He looks up at the ceiling and sighs. The nurse will be here in awhile to take him to therapy; Tuesday, what’s up first today? Physical, he thinks. Sounds about right. Ten o’clock? Eleven? Something like that. It’s not important; they’ll tell him when they need to. He’ll get where he needs to go, he’ll be shepherded off in the right direction. For now, he’s got like…an hour, hour and a half to sit with his thoughts. Plan what he wants to say to Harvey the next time they speak, how he wants to broach the subject.

“So I overheard Donna yelling at you a few days ago…”

Mike presses his fists to his eyes, and a gentle knock sounds at the door.

He really should’ve seen that one coming.

Harvey’s shoes click a little as he walks across the floor, and Mike takes a second to consider feigning sleep before he remembers that that would be stupid, and kind of mean. Instead, as Harvey peers hopefully around the corner, Mike pushes himself up against his pillows and smiles.

“I was just thinking about you.”

Harvey smiles back. “Hopefully nothing too incriminating.”

Mike’s smile freezes in place as he tries to think of what to say to that, and Harvey holds his gaze just long enough for Mike to see the moment he starts getting nervous.

“It wasn’t _that_ bad.”

Harvey laughs quietly, and this is…nice.

Too bad it’s not going to last forever.

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“How did— Wait, what?”

“How did what?”

For one chaotic moment, they stare at each other in tense anticipation, and Mike hunches over just a little bit as a sinking feeling makes him sick to his stomach and he hopes Harvey doesn’t notice, even though he surely will. This is everything he wanted, exactly what he wished for, and now it’s all ruined, and he doesn’t even know why.

Except then they both smile again, and Harvey laughs quietly, sticking his hands in his pockets and raising his shoulders as he looks down at the floor, and Mike rests his chin on his knees when Harvey shakes his head back and forth, and everything’s going to be okay. Really, it is. It’s alright.

“What did you want to talk about?” Harvey asks, still smiling.

Mike bites down on the inside of his cheek and tries very hard not to lose his nerve.

“Doctor Andrews said I’m lucky to have you in my life,” he begins. It’s not exactly the point he wanted to make; more of a preamble, but it’s not like it isn’t true, and Harvey will appreciate hearing it. Mike agrees with her, after all, it being an objective truth that anybody would be lucky to have Harvey as a friend.

Except then Mike raises his eyes to Harvey’s face, and Harvey looks like he’s doing everything in his power to stop himself from running, from fleeing the room, and Mike doesn’t know what’s just happened but he’s fairly sure that it’s all his fault.

“I do too,” he blurts out, pushing himself forward onto his knees, leaning toward the end of the bed where Harvey stands with his lips pressed tight together and his arms folded across his stomach and his eyes locked on something or other out the window.

“I do,” he insists. “I know I never said it, but I guess I just… I figured you already knew.”

Closing his eyes, Harvey shakes his head, the corner of his mouth quirking up in a hint of a smirk that might be a reflex or might be forced for his benefit, but Mike can’t quite tell which.

Harvey clears his throat and shuffles his foot along the floor.

“You’re right,” he says in a hollow sort of voice. “We should talk.”

Mike sits back on his haunches.

This is a good idea.

“Okay.”

After a moment’s pause, Harvey steps toward the chair beside the bed; another moment, and he sets his hand on the backrest, hunching his shoulders forward and then drawing them back.

Mike sits back and wraps his arms around his legs.

Harvey sighs.

“You remember I told you about Roy?” he asks, directing the question to the ground; Mike nods anyway, and Harvey purses his lips. “I told you he was the guy who hit you, the guy whose friend air-lifted you to the hospital. Saved your life.”

Mike nods, and Harvey looks out the window.

“We were in the Hamptons,” he says. “You and I, we were trying to…confront this guy, Gideon Blake, he was manufacturing fake flu vaccines, handing them out to desperate doctors, Mike, people—people were dying, and you were working so hard on your case with Soloff, and he was such a dick, and I…”

Mike huddles against his knees, and Harvey looks him right in the eye.

“I stopped the car on the side of the road,” he says. “Across from his house, and I got out and I crossed the road, and you were coming around the hood, starting to come after me, and Roy comes and—hits you.”

Mike blinks slowly, and Harvey clenches his jaw.

“It was my idea to take the case,” he says. “It was my idea to go to the Hamptons, it was my idea to park across from Blake’s house and it was my idea to cross the road.”

Harvey stares at Mike, his eyes flashing, shining, sparkling, and Mike pulls his knees in closer to his chest.

“I can never make up for this,” Harvey concedes, “but I want… I want you to know how sorry I am.” He glances down, and then back up, and his eyes seem a little clearer.

“I’d take it all back, if I could.”

Mike nods, scratching the cotton fabric of his pajama pants stretched taut across his thighs. So that’s how it is, then. No wonder no one’s brought it up to him before now.

He smiles to himself.

“I guess I should’ve looked both ways before I crossed the street.”

Harvey’s grip tightens on the back of the chair beside the bed.

“Mike.”

“It’s okay,” he says, uncertain that he means the words he’s saying but needing to say them, needing Harvey to hear them all the same. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

“ _Mike._ ”

Mike shrugs, a vague attempt at indifference, and Harvey shakes his head slowly, seemingly unaware that he’s even doing it but horrified that Mike isn’t giving him this, isn’t permitting him to take the blame, to shoulder this weight.

“I… You, you can’t do that,” Harvey fumbles. “You— Don’t blame yourself, Mike, this— This isn’t your fault. _None_ of it is your fault.”

Mike looks down at the blanket underneath him.

Isn’t it though? Kind of sort of just a little bit?

Harvey dares to step closer, starting to raise his hand and clenching his fist to stop himself.

“You know this isn’t your fault.”

Mike starts to shrug again, but then he looks up, into Harvey’s eyes, and no, there’ll be none of that. Harvey won’t have it. This isn’t Mike’s fault and that’s all there is to it, no further questions.

_I know you feel guilty about all of this._

Mike picks at the blanket bunched up next to his feet.

“Yeah,” he says indifferently, hoping it sounds like a foregone conclusion. “But I mean, it’s not yours, either.”

Harvey smiles thinly.

“Thanks, Mike.”

Mike wavers for a second between replying “You’re welcome” and “Of course,” except that Harvey doesn’t really believe him, so there’s not much point to either one.

“I’m serious,” he tries again. “Maybe I’m just unlucky. I’m not saying it was my _fault,_ ” he insists before Harvey can object, because he isn’t sure he isn’t saying exactly that, “but I think I probably ran out of my entire life’s allotment of good luck the day I met you, so… I dunno, maybe this is just one of those things that happens.”

Something in Harvey seems to have broken, badly stalled at Mike’s refusal to let him burden himself; his eyes narrow perplexedly, suddenly baffled, utterly undone, and this is the one thing, somehow, the only thing he hadn’t prepared for, the only thing he didn’t see coming a mile away. He knows how to shield Mike from this guilt, knows how to bear it himself, but to have it cast off, unmoored, dissolving into nothingness…

_I know you feel guilty._

Well, _someone_ needs to be blamed for all of this.

Mike grinds his molars and bites down on his lower lip.

“You don’t need to make anything up to me.”

“Don’t I?” Harvey says abruptly, jolting back to life as Mike looks up at him evenly. “Even if I wasn’t driving the car, Mike, the whole thing was my idea; we were there, _you_ were there, on that road, because of me, because I wanted to score some, some kind of victory, _any_ victory, I wanted some—cheap points, and it wouldn’t even have _meant_ anything, taking down a guy like that, there was nothing _to_ it; if we hadn’t done it, someone else would’ve, I just, I just noticed it first, and there’s no real satisfaction in something like that, I was just— I was desperate, I grabbed the first easy win that came my way, and— And now…”

Harvey drops his hands, and Mike drops his gaze.

And now, this.

But it’s okay, because Harvey will fix it. Yes, Harvey can fix everything. Harvey can fix _anything._

Mike smiles wanly, and wonders what Harvey makes of the gesture.

Maybe not _anything._

“I know you’re supposed to be at the office right now,” he says softly. Harvey steps closer to hear him better, and his smile turns wry as he looks back up. “I know it’s Tuesday, I know you have a lot of cases, and your work is piling up, and you have other responsibilities besides me. And I know you’re not sleeping very well,” a gamble, but not much of one, judging by the depth of the guilt painted across Harvey’s face, “and I know you’re doing everything you can to help me, and I really appreciate it, and I don’t know what I’d be doing now if you hadn’t done everything you have, but…”

The sorrow, the shame in Harvey’s eyes nearly undoes him, but he shakes his head and forces himself to finish:

“But I don’t want you to hurt yourself for me.”

Please.

Isn’t that a simple thing to ask?

But Harvey wilts before his very eyes, and Mike nearly takes it all back, nearly tells him everything is fine, he’s doing it all right, everything’s perfect, except that he knows better. He can’t keep this up forever, and Mike can’t ask him to try. No matter how determined Harvey is to save the world, or even just to save Mike, this isn’t going to last.

Mike leans forward beseechingly, and Harvey stands still.

“Please.”

Time doesn’t move right anymore.

Out the window, a mighty wind makes the treetops shake, blowing this way and that as a bird struggles to perch on the windowsill and an unfortunate umbrella whips past, turned inside out and broken along at least two of its spokes. Out the window, the world moves along as it always has, as it always will, in a forward-type motion, more or less a straight line, day to night, dawn to dusk. Out the window, things are as they are, as they have been and, more than likely, will be for the foreseeable future.

Inside, in this room, enclosed in these walls, Harvey stands still, and Mike has stumbled upon the secret of time travel.

“Harvey?”

Harvey parts his lips weakly, a vague attempt to come up with some response, some agreement or refusal or who knows what, the past rushing to catch up with him all at once as his eyes fall, shuttered and dim and so very, very tired.

“Okay.”

Mike looks up at him, and Harvey tries to smile.

“Okay,” he says in his brittle voice, held together with pins and sellotape and force of will. “I’m going back to the office,” he says in layers, holding back all the words he wants to say that are no longer allowed. “Here’s my cell phone number,” he fishes a business card from his suit jacket, casting about for a pen and finding one next to the phone, “call me anytime. I mean it, Mike,” he asserts. “Anytime. You need anything, you want anything, you want to talk, just… Anything. Give me a call. Anytime.”

Mike nods and takes the card. Harvey clears his throat.

“I’ll keep in touch with your doctors,” he says, “and I’ll be back as— I’ll be back when I can,” he corrects himself, “this weekend, if I can’t… If I can’t find the time before then.”

Mike looks up at him and smiles, and Harvey tries to smile back.

“Alright,” he says uncomfortably, “so.”

Mike tilts his head, and Harvey takes a small step backwards.

“Tell Jason I said hi.”

Taking another step backwards, Harvey rounds the edge of the bed and walks out the door, closing it gently behind him, and Mike wonders if he should have said “I will” or something like that.

It’s fine that he didn’t. Harvey probably wasn’t expecting anything.

And Mike is getting better.

\---

The gymnasium.

Nothing has changed. Nothing ever does. It’s for the best, really; Mike doesn’t know what he would do with himself if he arrived at the gym for physical therapy and found himself in a place altogether unfamiliar. Possibly the world would collapse in on itself, sucked down into a black hole otherwise invisible, or maybe Mike would need to schedule an extra appointment with Doctor Andrews to account for his rapid and dramatic regression after a lot of progress so far.

Mike sits on the treatment table with his shoulders hunched and his hands hanging slack between his knees.

All around him, people stand, sit, lie flat on their backs as they inch toward wellness, toward strength and recovery, telling themselves things will get better someday even if it doesn’t seem like it now. An old white-haired man attached to an oxygen tank plods along on the treadmill, one foot in front of the other, and Mike thinks he can hear his artificial breathing all the way across the room.

In this room, nothing moves. Everyone simply exists, crawling from one day to the next until they break through to the other side, months and months of healing balled up into “While I Was At The Hospital” and crammed into the past as the process speeds into overdrive, as they suddenly become accountable to other people’s needs, other people’s expectations. As “Do your best” bleeds into “Be good enough.”

The balance is important, between the invisible healing and the stuff everyone is allowed to see.

Mike hasn’t slept well the past few nights; that’s nice, that’s good. Everyone can relate. Progress.

_I’m sorry I can’t be there._

I’m sorry I can’t be perfect. I’m sorry I can’t do it all.

I’m sorry this is all my fault.

Mike isn’t even sure whose voice is speaking the words into his ear; maybe both of them, him and Harvey. One right after the other. Maybe together, maybe in unison.

Maybe this is one of those questions that doesn’t have an answer.

On the opposite side of the room, a young girl sitting on a large inflatable ball falls to the floor and clenches her jaw as she struggles not to cry.

Nothing else moves.

“You wanna start off with some jumping jacks?”

Mike looks over at Jason, appearing out of nowhere with his arched eyebrows and his goading expression, and tightens his grip on the edge of the treatment table.

“Harvey says hi.”

Yes, he does. He did. Three days ago now, or something like it, but better late than never.

Anyway.


	13. Chapter 13

It’s instantly obvious that something is odd about the situation. Or, rather, the situation is unnervingly familiar, which, by its nature, makes it somewhat odd.

Coming around the bed, Rachel pauses by the chair that’s always just sort of there, reaching out to touch the backrest and withdrawing her hand at the last moment, and Mike knows without question that he has lived this exact moment before.

Is this some bizarre result of the accident? The Traumatic Brain Injury, as they call it, which differs from _a_ traumatic brain injury in that it refers specifically to the way things will be from now on and usually means that his life is going to somehow drastically and pointedly change from what it was Before. Or perhaps he’s been living all this time in the Twilight Zone, which, for historical context, is a television show he’s quite certain he’s seen every episode of and would remember if he saw them again; perhaps the accident gave him the ability to see a bit into the future, and it seems cool and unique right now but the disastrous consequences will become clear soon enough.

There’s this thing called déjà vu, though, which, to the best of his knowledge, has no agreed-upon scientific explanation but accounts for exactly the sensation he’s experiencing, and he really should have known better than to think he was special in any way.

“Hi.”

She smiles down at him, holding her arms stiff at her sides, and he looks up at her patiently, having nowhere else to be.

“Mike, I… I want to talk to you.”

He leans into the pillows at his back and decides that he isn’t particularly surprised. He’s better than he was, better enough to be held accountable for the things he says and does, and it makes sense that this is the time for Talks. Talks with Doctor Andrews, Talks with Harvey. Talks about the future.

“About what?”

She turns her face away and bites her lip, and he wonders if she’s being coy, or maybe nervous. There’s nothing to be nervous about; he won’t judge her for the choices she’s made. And if he does, he’ll keep it to himself.

“So I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she ventures, “but I haven’t really been coming to visit you very much the last couple of weeks.”

Wasn’t that by design? Wasn’t that at his request?

Whatever.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she assures him, and he knows she does, but isn’t that part of the problem? “I’ve just been really busy, with school, and with work, and…usually by the time I’m finished with everything I have to do, it’s too late to come here anyway because visiting hours are almost over, and I have to be up early the next morning to get back to work, or go to an early class or something, and then before I know it I haven’t seen you in days, or weeks, and…”

She fidgets with the engagement ring around her finger, and he knows exactly what’s going to happen next.

“I was just thinking, I mean if I can’t make time for you _now,_ when you need me more than you’ve ever needed me before, or you’ll probably ever need me in the future, then…what does that say about…us?”

“Is this because you forgot to bring me a new book?” he asks wryly. She laughs, looking down and reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear when it falls in a curtain across her face. He watches her and hopes she isn’t reading too much into his indifference.

“I think we’re past that,” she says to the floor, to the chair that’s always just sort of there. Then she looks up at him, moving slowly, giving him time to cast her aside if he wants, to yell at her to get out, even though he wouldn’t. He won’t.

“Are you okay?”

This is supposed to hurt. This is supposed to be hard. This is supposed to be something that’ll keep him up all night.

This is something that’s best for the both of them.

“I will be,” he says, just in case there’s a moment later on when this hits him all at once and he feels like crying hideously, or throwing himself off a rooftop.

“I’m really sorry,” she says, obviously relieved but afraid of something so simple, so easy. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I really think it’s the best thing for us, when we’re obviously not in the right place for a relationship right now.”

“It’s okay,” he says as her smile becomes uncertain. They wait in an awkward sort of silence as he watches her fidgeting hands.

“Can I have the ring back?”

It belonged to my grandmother, after all.

Did it really? Yes, of course.

“Oh!” she gasps, twisting it off her finger and thrusting it toward him. “Oh my god, of course, wow, sorry.”

He closes his fist around the bauble, sinking back into the cushions and cradling it to his chest until she leaves and he can drop it in a drawer without offending her. Maybe Harvey will have some idea of what to do with it.

She twirls her hair around her fingers and looks at him uncertainly.

“So…are we okay?”

He nods.

“We’re good.”

She grins with palpable relief as he ponders how to bring this up to Doctor Andrews.

And Harvey will probably want to know.

\---

It goes without saying that Harvey didn’t find the time to come by for a visit before last weekend.

Well, no it doesn’t. The really surprising part, though, is that Harvey didn’t even make it by _during_ the weekend, and Mike hasn’t seen him for nearly two weeks now. It’s not that he’s rethinking his decision to tell Harvey to take care of himself; if Harvey got sick or hurt himself trying to take care of Mike, he’d never be able to forgive himself, but here, in the quiet, in the loneliness that comes on from time to time, it’s not hard to admit that he wishes things could be different.

Reaching over to the side table, Mike lands on the business card he makes a point of keeping within reach at all times, picking it up and looking over the phone number he’s long since memorized. It wasn’t even hard; he only had to read it once before it stuck in his brain, lodged in there as though he’s known it all his life. Did he know it before? Is this a recovered memory? Or maybe his brain is just some kind of weird, and no one’s bothered to tell him about it yet.

He’ll ask Harvey about it the next time they talk.

He rereads the number, smoothing his thumb over the ink.

Has he waited too long?

_Call me anytime._

Harvey wouldn’t lie about something like that.

Turning just enough to grab the phone, Mike dials the number imprinted in his mind and presses the receiver to his ear. He counts three rings before Harvey picks up, spaced out so exactly that he wonders if Harvey was counting the rings, too.

“Mike?”

Mike smiles.

“Hi.”

“Is everything alright?”

Harvey speaks with an even keel that sounds carefully scripted, and Mike stops smiling.

“Yeah,” he says. “I haven’t seen you in awhile, I just wanted to…check in.”

Harvey sighs, and that part probably wasn’t in the script.

“It’s been a madhouse around here,” he says. “We just signed a major new client, this guy Nathan Burns, but Jessica wanted this asshole Sutter instead, so I’ve been…dealing with that.”

At least he’s keeping himself busy with the important stuff.

“Am I interrupting something?” Mike asks, suddenly regretting everything he’s ever done. He was the one who told Harvey to take care of himself, to put himself first, and what is he doing now, making Harvey feel guilty for not talking to him? Not visiting? Not defying Mike’s wishes outright? Mike should hang up right now, or maybe Harvey should, to really get the message across.

“No,” Harvey says, “no, don’t worry about it. I was just about to go on my lunch break.”

Mike looks at the clock. It’s nearly five; either Harvey is lying through his teeth, or taking a lunch so late it might as well be dinner, and Mike isn’t sure which option is worse.

“Jason says hi.”

Harvey laughs quietly.

“Happy to hear it.”

Should he tell him about Rachel? About the broken engagement? Does Harvey already know, is it the kind of office gossip that gets around quickly? Does Harvey care? Mike thought he would, before, but with so much on his plate, so much crazy shit going on at the office and taking up all his time, something like this, something stupid and small about Mike’s personal life will just distract him. It’ll all come out eventually, just. Not right now.

“I’m glad you’re doing okay,” he says, even though he isn’t quite sure that’s the best phrasing for what he means.

Harvey breathes out slowly.

“It’s great to hear from you, Mike.”

Mike smiles and scratches his nails across the bedsheets and tries not to feel like a terrible person.

Next time will be better.

\---

Mike sits quietly and stares at the table in front of him, and Nicole sits quietly and stares at her hands in front of her, and one of them should probably say something, but Mike doesn’t know quite where to start.

“My dad asked me if I want to go to summer school,” Nicole says.

Mike looks over at her gratefully. “For what?” he asks.

“Geometry.”

“Cool.”

She smiles briefly, and he smiles back.

“He and my mother met with my principal,” she explains, “and he said that if I pass Geometry over the summer and take math classes in junior and senior year, I can graduate on time since I’m going back next semester for English.”

“Congratulations.”

She nods, drumming her fingers softly against the tabletop.

“They’re making a lot of exceptions for me,” she says. “My school requires four years of English, but I’m only gonna have three and a half, and they waived the gym requirement because of my head injury. And the foreign language requirement, for some reason.”

“That’s nice of them,” Mike offers, but she only sets her chin in her hands and looks down, so he decides to try something a little different:

“My fiancée broke up with me.”

Lifting her head, she winces, and he wonders how she’s relating to the situation.

“That sucks.”

Nicole doesn’t like to say “I’m sorry” the way most people do, he’s noticed. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

“At least she gave me the ring back,” he says. “And I think we’re still friends.”

“Can people do that?” she asks skeptically. “I feel like everyone always says they want to be friends with their exes, but then no one actually is.”

Mike grins. “I hope we can. She’s nice, I like her when she’s not telling me what to do.”

“Huh.” Nicole narrows her eyes. “Okay, well, good luck.”

“Yeah, you too.”

She smiles at him, and he thinks about telling her about the last time he tried to call Harvey, what she might make of the fact that he answered just long enough to tell Mike he was in a meeting and couldn’t talk, even though he said Mike could call at any time, except that Kaitlyn swans in with her stack of worksheets and an honest to god video tape, and anyway, that might be a little much to ask of a fifteen year old he barely knows.

He hasn’t seen Harvey in three weeks. Three weeks and a couple of days.

Mike doodles circles and squares on his worksheet as Kaitlyn walks out of the room to look for a television with a VCR.

\---

No one comes to visit anymore.

Other people are around now and again, visitors to see other people, and he recognizes a few of them even though they’ve never met, but no one comes for Mike. He doesn’t mind, really, being that he knows Rachel is busy with work and school, and he can’t very well be angry with Harvey for staying away, considering. Donna hasn’t been by since that time she yelled at Harvey, but Mike isn’t sure he’d be able to see her without bringing it up, so maybe that’s for the best.

It’s nice, having all this time alone. Having all this time to heal in private, to have weird thoughts and no one to ask him about them, to judge him for sitting quietly and thinking about nothing at all.

Harvey said he’d be by when he could.

Mike pulls the blankets up to his chin and tightens all the muscles in his chest, tucking his body in tight before he relaxes into the pillows and looks disjointedly at the television mounted on the wall.

Mike has become disengaged from linear time.

The hospital is his home, the place he’s lived for as long as he can remember; those fragmented recollections he has of other apartments, other houses, they haven’t happened yet, they might never happen at all. They might happen for the rest of forever starting next Tuesday, they might have happened every day for the entire history of recorded time.

No one’s been to see him for a whole month.

Nicole is going back to school soon, moving into the outpatient program; she’ll be around for group therapy, and physical therapy, though she says she’s almost finished with that, for now. He wished her luck and said he’d miss her, and she thanked him even though she seemed uncomfortable to hear it, and he doesn’t know what he really meant by it in the first place.

Mike lives at the hospital by himself.

Harvey said to give him a call if he wanted to talk.

Alright, fine. Pulling his arm out from under the covers, Mike reaches for the phone behind the clock and dials Harvey’s number, which stuck in his brain as soon as he read it, and cradles the phone to his ear.

Click.

“This is Harvey Specter, leave a message.”

Mike blinks up at the television mounted on the wall. Anytime, Harvey said.

The tone sounds for him to leave a message, and he hangs up instead.

Mike lives at the hospital by himself.

It’s late, he thinks, looking out the window at the dusky-colored light; Harvey might be busy, might be working late, might be at some sort of party or gala or something. “Call me anytime” is a nice thing to say, a kind gesture, but realistically, practically, when it comes right down to it…

Too much.

It’s alright. He brought this on himself.

Mike sighs.

Has he had dinner yet tonight? Who knows, who can remember; someone will be bringing him something, or someone already did. Any more therapy today? Who knows, who keeps track; someone will come fetch him, or everyone will leave him alone.

The door opens, and he hopes it’s no one he has to smile for.

The nurses don’t wear shoes that click when they walk across the floor.

Tucking his arm back in under the covers, Mike looks at the curtain as Harvey peeks around it with a fallen sort of expression on his face, almost like he doesn’t want to be here in the first place. Of course, if that was the case, he could just as easily not have come.

Couldn’t he?

Yeah. Sure.

“I called you,” Mike says when Harvey doesn’t introduce himself.

“I know,” Harvey rasps. Stepping into view, coming to the foot of the bed, he clears his throat and tries again.

“I know,” he repeats. “I was in a meeting with Sutter, trying to convince him to sign us as his attorneys, and if I couldn’t get him on board, I think Jessica might’ve actually fired me.”

Mike can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.

“I mean I just called you,” Mike says. “A few minutes ago. You didn’t pick up.”

The corner of Harvey’s mouth twitches up. “The hospital doesn’t allow cell phones.”

Mike takes his hands out from under the covers. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Mike scratches at the bedsheets and looks down at his knees.

“Look, Mike,” Harvey says uncomfortably, “I’m here because I want to say I’m sorry.”

Mike looks up and forces himself not to say that he doesn’t have anything to apologize for.

“I didn’t know what to do when you forgave me, I didn’t… I’ve spent such a long time imagining what you would say when you found out and dammit, Mike, I never…” He laughs darkly, and Mike slides back a little to sit up straighter.

“I never thought you’d say that.”

Mike smiles thinly. “It’s not your fault,” he says. “That I got hit.”

“I know,” Harvey assures him. “I know. Took awhile, but I think I got it. Now. I get it. But this—you, all of this has been the center of my life for such a long time now, it’s been the only thing I’ve thought about, it’s what I’ve worked my life around, it’s… You were the only thing that _mattered,_ ” he says as though he’s realizing it himself for the very first time, “and Donna was right, and Jessica was right, and you were right, I was, I was neglecting my duties, I wasn’t taking care of myself, and if I want to be able to be there for you, to be _here_ for you, I need to do better. I need to be better.”

Mike nods solemnly. It’s true, it’s all true.

And he’ll live at the hospital by himself.

“But I didn’t just want to apologize for that,” Harvey goes on ardently. “I want to— I’m sorry I haven’t been here for a month, I’m sorry _I_ haven’t called _you,_ I’m sorry I haven’t figured out how to…how to take care of both of us. How to be here without driving you nuts.”

“You weren’t,” Mike swears. “I like having you around, I just don’t want you to pretend you don’t have a life outside of me, because I know you do, and you’re not going to—hurt my feelings, if you have to go and live it.”

Smirking, Harvey shakes his head slowly as his eyes crinkle up at the corners and his teeth begin to show at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re a good man, Mike Ross.”

Mike smiles.

Is a good man allowed to ask a selfish thing? I hope so.

“Harvey,” he says carefully, uncertain of exactly where to look and landing around Harvey’s throat. “I still want you to take care of yourself, but…can you still come visit sometimes?”

Harvey’s face falls immediately, and Mike shakes his head.

“You don’t have to come during the week or anything, I’m not asking you to come every day, just…once in awhile. Once a month.”

“Mike.” Harvey steps around to the side of the bed, up to Mike tucked into his pillow and blankets. “I… I’m sorry I haven’t figured out how to—” He sighs out through his teeth, shaking his head sharply. “Look, I’ve never been any good at balancing my professional life and my personal one, I can’t…compartmentalize, when it comes to the people I love.”

Mike nods slowly. He shouldn’t have expected much; he didn’t, really. He should’ve known better, and he did.

“But you know what,” Harvey starts over with a new fervor, “it’s about goddamn time I learned. I’m going to go to work, and do my job, and you know what, Mike, I am going to come here, and I’m going to spend time with you. Not because I have to, not because I feel guilty, but because I want to see you, because I’ll tell you something, I miss you, Mike. I do. I miss you, and I want to hang out, and play cards, or…chat, or watch TV, or or or whatever you feel like, whatever we’re in the mood for.”

“Harvey—”

“And you can ask me questions, or you can tell me to go home, or we can just sit around, I can do work, you can read a book, however we want to play this, we’ll figure it out.”

Harvey’s breathing is somewhat labored, his face a little flushed, and Mike looks up at him with what he hopes is a kind expression, a genuine sort of acceptance; he hopes Harvey will understand him, will believe the words he says, and the ones he doesn’t. Hopes he’ll be able to persuade himself that it’s okay.

“Thank you, Harvey.”

Harvey smiles, and for the moment, Mike is perfectly happy right where he is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harvey signs Nathan Burns as a client, in defiance of Jessica’s wishes that he sign William Sutter instead, in “Back on the Map” (s06e03).


	14. Chapter 14

Everything is confusion.

It shouldn’t be, and it isn’t, really, but in a way, an abstract way completely separate from the room that he’s in, the hospital where he lives, the words Shay is saying to him, the ones she’s expecting him to say back, the question she’s waiting for him to answer, everything is unlike it’s ever been before.

Mike feels along the sofa where he sits for the old stuffed dog with the downy ears and pulls it into his lap.

“Should I take that as a ‘no’?”

“Mm.” Mike nods dimly at the spot on the wall across the room.

Shay rests her arm on her desk and leans into it.

“Do _you_ feel like you’re ready?”

Is he ready?

There’s no such thing as “ready.” He lives in moments, a world of instants that have no bearing on the future and no connection to the past. How can he be ready when anything could happen? The last thing he wants, the last thing he expects, all of it is possible.

“For what?”

Shay looks down at the folder underneath her arm. Just to be sure.

“To go home.”

Home.

Mike doesn’t live at the hospital anymore.

He rubs the dog’s downy ears between his fingers.

“Where am I going to go?”

She looks down at the folder underneath her arm, and her mouth stretches in not-exactly-a-smile.

“You understand that we pretty much have to insist that you not live alone? At least for awhile?”

Obviously.

“I know.”

“And from what you’ve told me,” she says carefully, “it sounds like Rachel spends most of her time out of the house; would she be able to come with you to therapy?”

Mike rubs the dog’s downy ears between his fingers.

“Rachel broke up with me.”

Shay only startles a little; she doesn’t seem as surprised as he expected. She should be more surprised; or maybe most people don’t come out of the hospital with the same relationships they went in with, maybe most people’s fiancées don’t last through the healing process. Maybe he doesn’t talk about Rachel enough, maybe this was obvious from a million miles away.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Maybe he should just throw himself off a rooftop.

“I should, right?”

She looks at him curiously, and maybe for once he’s allowed to not care about something he probably ought to.

“I’m fine,” he says. “It’s fine. I don’t know, it’s…fine.”

She nods, just once, and looks him right in the eye.

“We can talk about it later, if you want to.”

“Okay.”

Just in case.

“So is it fair to say you probably don’t want to move back in with Rachel when you leave here?”

Fair. Is this fair? Is any of this fair?

Of course not, but that doesn’t matter.

“Yeah.”

He hugs the dog to his chest, and she writes a note in his file.

“So if you’re not going to live with her, I want you to try to think about what other options are out there.”

Other options?

He rubs the dog’s downy ears between his fingers and nods steadily.

“Let’s get back to that one after you’ve had some time to think about it.”

Later.

Nothing special has happened, and life is about to begin again.

\---

“Hey,” Harvey says, stepping around the curtain with a smile on his face and a little bit of tension in his shoulders. “I got your message, is everything okay?”

Mike looks up from the book open on his knees— _Freakonomics_ , something Harvey recommended with a little trepidation that he didn’t explain—and smiles back in a way that’s meant to seem reassuring.

“Do you know when I’m being discharged?”

Harvey nearly walks into the chair at Mike’s bedside.

“No one’s mentioned anything to me,” he says as Mike draws his eyebrows together worriedly. “But you’re alright? I’m sorry I couldn’t return your call, I, I guess I figured it would be better to see you in person, if something was wrong, if you needed to talk. Do you want me to talk to Doctor Irving? Or Doctor Andrews? Do you need me to get you something?”

Harvey will fix it.

No. No, Harvey is already doing everything he can.

“When I saw Shay yesterday,” Mike explains, “she asked me where I was staying after I left the hospital. She asked me if I’m ready to go home, if I know where I’m going to go, and, I didn’t really know what to say.”

Harvey frowns apprehensively, and Mike shrugs.

“Rachel and I broke up.”

Harvey winces, and Mike smiles neutrally.

“It’s okay. It was for the best.”

“You sure? Because I’ll take your word for it if you are,” Harvey hurries on, “I just want to…make sure.”

You’re a good man, is what you are, Harvey Specter. Mike lowers his gaze to the bedsheets and crosses his legs underneath them.

“I’m sure.”

Harvey nods.

“Okay.”

Mike leans into the pillows at his back.

“We’ll figure something out,” Harvey says, sitting in the bedside chair. “I’ll talk to Doctor Andrews, we’ll get someone to help you with your therapy or your medication or whatever you’re gonna need when you get out of here. We’ll rent you an apartment or something, we’ll figure it out.”

Harvey can fix anything.

“I’m not supposed to live alone,” Mike says. “For awhile.”

“We’ll hire someone live-in,” Harvey say immediately. “I’m sure someone here can give me some names or hook me up with a service or something. Don’t worry about it.”

Worry? That isn’t quite the word for this feeling in his chest.

It’s not that Mike wants to be difficult. It isn’t. Harvey’s doing so much, and working so hard, and Mike is thankful. He is. It’s just that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, they don’t know what they’re doing, and nobody seems to know what’s going to happen next. And it’s fine, really, except that sooner or later they’re going to have to figure it out, and Mike doesn’t particularly want to…what.

Is a good man allowed to ask a selfish thing?

“Does it have to be someone new?”

Harvey sits with his hands in his lap, and a crease in his brow, and a certain firmness in his eyes, and Mike never, ever wants to be on the opposite side of the table from him, ever again.

Again?

Later.

“We’ll figure it out,” Harvey promises.

Mike believes him.

“How are you?” he asks, because Harvey is working hard to be everything for everyone, and Mike isn’t sure anyone’s thought to ask him that in awhile.

Harvey smiles.

“I’m doing fine,” he says. “Jessica’s taken most of Sutter’s account on herself; I landed him, I did my part. I think she knows better than to ask too much of me on this one.”

Office politics; Jessica did always know how to play them.

That world that Mike used to belong to, that place where he used to fit. That labyrinth he used to be able to navigate, that life he used to know.

“Hey Harvey?”

“Mm?”

Mike shrugs his shoulders forward and leaves them up just long enough to pretend he isn’t suddenly feeling enormously insecure.

“Tell me my story.”

The room is full of stillness.

Dropping his shoulders, raising his eyes, Mike listens for the bustle of nurses and patients and well-wishers rushing and dawdling about in the halls, the faint squeak of friction that might belong to Basil, the old man who wheels an IV stand around with him wherever he goes, or maybe an empty wheelchair being brought down the hall to the gym, where the doors are always open in case of emergency. Harvey’s mouth falls open, his lips parted silently, and Mike listens for the shuffle of nurses’ shoes on the linoleum, the echo of acquaintances passing on their way to therapy and wishing each other well.

A car stops short on the street out the window, the squeal of its tires mercilessly shrill, and Harvey closes his mouth and clasps his hands together tight.

“Are you sure?” he asks, looking up with his eyes narrowed a little bit from the lower lids in a nervous sort of way. And Mike wants to say yes, he wants to be sure, because Harvey wants to tell him, he knows; Harvey wants Mike to get better, he wants him to have his memories back, he wants him to feel like himself, but this isn’t the sort of thing a person gets asked every day, this isn’t the sort of weight most people ever have to bear.

Are you sure?

You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

You don’t know what you’re getting into, but I do.

So are you sure?

Mike nods slowly.

“Yeah.”

Harvey nods back.

“Tell me if you want me to stop.”

Mike smiles softly, and Harvey clears his throat.

“When you were eleven,” he begins, “your parents, James and Nina—were killed, in…in a car crash. Drunk driver, a guy named Fenton.”

Mike survived being hit by a car being driven by a sober man. It means something, doesn’t it? In a full-circle kind of way?

Maybe if the universe was a little less arbitrary, or a little less unfair.

Harvey presses his lips together, his fingers clenching, and maybe Mike should ask him to stop.

No. This is important.

“You were raised by your grandmother,” Harvey presses on, looking resolutely into Mike’s eyes, “a wonderful woman named Edith who loved you very, very much.”

Loved.

Doesn’t take much to read into that.

“You also had a friend, a best friend named Trevor,” Harvey says, and it sounds like reassurance, sounds like he’s trying to offer comfort. “You lived with him after you moved out of your grandmother’s house, the two of you— You didn’t have much, but you did the best you could.”

What must that life have been like?

Things are different now.

“Trevor got himself mixed up in some things he shouldn’t have been dealing with,” Harvey hedges, “and one day he asked you to deliver some pot to a hotel, to the Chilton Hotel, for twenty-five thousand dollars. And your grandmother, she was in nursing care, and, you know, nursing care is expensive, and you were doing everything you could but it wasn’t easy making ends meet, keeping food on the table, paying for her medication, all of that, and you had a twenty-five thousand dollar bill that needed paying, so you… You did what you had to do. Or what you thought you had to do, you put on a suit and you got your briefcase full of drugs and you got yourself down to the Chilton.”

Mike pulls his knees up toward his chest. This is a good story, about a good man trying to do the right thing in the wrong way. And Trevor, who’s made a lot of mistakes and whose name puts a funny mix of feelings in Mike’s stomach and the back of his head; Trevor’s been gone a long time now, he knows. Mike wonders if they had a falling out or something; it was probably for the best, whatever it was. Or maybe not, maybe it was just one of those things. A couple of old friends drifting apart the way that people do.

“So you went to the room,” Harvey goes on, “and these two cops were standing outside the door— One of them was dressed up like a bellboy, but you’d seen him downstairs with his luggage cart all full of suitcases, and now it was empty, that was how you knew they were cops, and the other one was dressed as a resident at the hotel except he had his gun right there on his belt, and you said that was how you knew they weren’t very good ones, so you asked them what time it was, and then you just…kept on walking.”

Mike grins. Good, that was good; that was clever, that was quick.

“That’s when they started chasing me?” he guesses, and Harvey smiles wide.

“And you remembered the sign in the lobby about our interviews, so you came down to see if we’d hide you, and I guess Donna thought you were being clever or something because she let you in, and you told me everything about the drop, and I…” Harvey sniffs a little laugh, shaking his head as his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “I hired you right on the spot, and that’s how that started.”

“You hired me on the spot?”

Harvey shrugs. “What can I say, I know a good thing when I see it.”

Mike bites his lip. That’s all very well and good, and it’s not that he isn’t grateful, but…

“Why?”

Harvey flinches, and Mike wonders if he’s ever asked the question before. If Harvey’s ever refused to answer, if he’s ever made something up to calm Mike’s badgering. Maybe neither of them ever thought it mattered, maybe he shouldn’t be looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Mike picks at the hospital blanket draped over his legs.

What gift horse?

Harvey unclasps his hands and lets them hang in his lap.

“Would you believe me if I said you reminded me of me?”

Mike would laugh if the question didn’t sound so dejected.

Harvey sighs.

“When you were at school,” he says, “in college, you had some pretty high hopes for yourself. You were at a city college, but you were accepted to transfer to Harvard, and you were going to move the next year. Your sophomore year. But you and Trevor, you… The two of you did some stupid things, to try to make a little money.”

Harvey’s shoulder blades stick out as he hunches down over his lap, and Mike sits up and moves a little closer.

“Trevor was selling pot,” Harvey dismisses, “and he was selling test answers, helping people cheat. And one day, he asked you to help him out, he asked you to write down the answers to this math test that a girl he knew wanted to buy, and because he was your friend, and you two were in it together, you did it, except that the girl was the dean’s daughter, and he found out, and he expelled the two of you and got your transfer revoked.”

“How did I know the answers?” Mike asks, because that seems like it might be a nice part of the story, it might be something to take Harvey’s mind off of all the rest of it. Harvey looks up quickly, his brow creased as though Mike’s brought him out of a daze, and he smiles.

“You’ve got an eidetic memory,” he says. “You did, anyway, I don’t— So,” he interrupts himself, “when we first met, when you were trying to impress me, you told me you’d passed the bar, you asked me to quiz you from the Barbri— You told me to ask you any question from the study guide for the bar exam, and I did, and you… You nailed it, right away, didn’t have to think twice. I asked you how you knew all that, and you were such a smartass, you said, ‘I like to read.’”

Mike laughs into his fist, and Harvey grins nostalgically.

“You read something once,” he elaborates, “and you understand it, and once you understand it, you never forget it. You were a smart kid with everything going against him, and you… You just needed someone to take a chance on you.”

Somebody who knew where he’d been, somebody who could understand where he’d come from, and why he’d done the things he had. Somebody willing to take a risk, to try something crazy. Something kind of weird.

“Your phone number.”

“Hm?”

It’s nice, this thing they do. It can’t be easy dealing with someone whose thoughts and ideas come out in headlines and soundbites, taking shape as he speaks them out loud instead of the other way around, but Harvey is patient, and kind, and good, and he tries his best to understand.

And things are getting better.

“You wrote your number on your business card,” Mike says, laying his hand on the side table to touch the card, in reach at all times even though he doesn’t need it anymore. “I read it when you gave it to me, and then when I called you, I— I just knew it, I didn’t check the card or anything.”

Harvey smiles, and Mike stretches his legs out in front of him.

“Come live with me.”

Harvey isn’t smiling anymore, and Mike tries not to stare.

It’s a perfect solution, isn’t it? Mike doesn’t have any family, if his parents are dead, and his grandmother (and he knew they were, he did), and his fiancée’s walked out on him and he doesn’t have anywhere to go, and now Harvey, with his millions of dollars and his penthouse apartment—Mike’s been there, he’ll know it when he sees it, and Harvey’s offering it to him, just like that, an easy answer to this insane situation, this sudden problem, this—this thing that needs fixing.

Harvey needs to fix everything.

Mike looks out the window.

“You’re not going to have time,” he says. “I can’t ask you to take care of me, Harvey, that’s crazy. You’re going to kill yourself with this, and…I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not asking,” Harvey counters. “I’m offering. I’m not even offering, I’m asking. I’m being a selfish son of a bitch, I’m asking you to come live with me so I can watch you while you get better, so I can see you every day and know you’re doing okay, so I can go with you to your therapy and your doctor’s appointments and I can help you when things get hard. Mike.”

Harvey stands and puts his hands in his pockets, even though he looks like he’d rather have them on Mike’s shoulders, and Mike wouldn’t mind if he did.

“I’m gonna be going crazy checking on you, and trying not to drive you nuts by checking on you all the time, and calling your doctors every day to see if they have any updates for me. And I won’t do anything you tell me not to,” he swears. “If you want me to back off, I will, if living with me drives you up the wall, we’ll figure something else out, but if it doesn’t, if we can make this work… I really think it’d be for the best.”

Don’t you?

Mike tries not to smile, but it’s hard, and probably not worth the effort.

Why not take the easy way out for once? After all this time, he sort of deserves it, doesn’t he?

“Okay,” he murmurs.

A bird perches on the windowsill, and the treetops are still.

Okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Trevor, a person is more likely to die while dealing drugs than they would be on death row. In Texas.”  
> “Wait, what are you talking about?”  
> “It’s from _Freakonomics_. Do you read anything that I give you?”  
>  —Mike and Trevor, “[Pilot](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)” (s01e01)
> 
> “How can you know all that?”  
> “I told you. I like to read. And once I read something, I understand it. And once I understand it, I never forget it.”  
> —Harvey and Mike, “Pilot” (s01e01)
> 
> Levitt, S. D., & Dubner, S. J. (2005). _Freakonomics_. New York City: William Morrow.


	15. Chapter 15

“So you’re going home tomorrow, huh?”

Mike smiles, just at the corner of his mouth, holding his arms out to his sides mostly for show as he lifts his left knee toward his chest and balances on his right leg.

“My boss is letting me stay at his house.”

Jason holds up a weighted black ball a little bigger than his fist. “Nice guy.”

“Yeah.” Mike lowers his arms. “He’s my best friend.”

“Cool.” Jason tosses the ball toward Mike’s shoulder. “You planning to keep exercising?”

Mike catches the ball in one hand. “I’d like to, but I haven’t really thought about…how. Exactly.”

Jason nods slowly. “Alright, well, whatever you end up going with, make sure it’s something that doesn’t risk you hitting your head. No high-impact sports, alright? No soccer, nothing with balls.”

Mike tosses the ball back with a little laugh. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’m serious,” Jason says sternly. “I know you feel better, and you’ve made a lot of progress, but you’re still recovering. You gotta take care of yourself.”

Lowering his leg back to the ground, Mike leans on the parallel bar to his right.

“I will.”

A lot of things are getting better.

And he’s going home tomorrow.

\---

This is Mike’s last hospital lunch for awhile. Maybe forever.

Shoving the rice with peas and carrots around on his plate, he thinks that might not be the worst thing in the world. At least the pineapple is sweet; probably because it comes from a can.

It’s alright.

“Mike?”

Biting down on the last cube of fruit, he looks up with his eyebrows arched inquisitively as a nurse comes in, holding a thin file folder in her arms and smiling warmly. She might be overcompensating a little; it’s not like she’s interrupting anything important.

“My name’s Darlene, I’m here to take you to your meeting with Doctor Irving,” she says. “You ready to go?”

Meeting?

“Yeah,” he says, pushing the lunch tray off to the side and setting his feet down on the floor. “Yeah, let’s go.”

She smiles in a relieved sort of way, and he follows her down the hall to the elevators in silence.

As they wait, she begins shifting her weight nervously, and he wonders if she’s new.

“So how excited are you to be going home?” she asks, her voice restrained in such a way that he knows she’s bursting with it, with her excitement for him, her pride and enthusiasm for his case even though he doesn’t think they’ve ever met before.

He smiles thinly, sticking his hands into his pockets.

“It’s pretty great.”

That’s what she wants, right? He’s gotten good at this, this pandering.

She walks them briskly to an examination room, sandwiched between two other examination rooms, both empty, and Mike hoists himself up onto the table carefully so as not to rip the paper lining.

“Doctor Irving will be here soon,” Darlene says, clutching the folder to her chest and smiling at him. “Are you feeling okay? Does anything hurt?”

Mike pushes himself back far enough to lean against the wall.

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

“Okay.” She smiles again and pats the table, as though it could use the comfort. “Congratulations.”

Because he’s done something so remarkable.

“Thanks.”

Stepping out into the hall, she closes the door carefully behind her, and Mike drops his head back with a soft thump.

George Washington, twenty-one Broadway, blue shoe.

He should be proud; things are going well.

After physical therapy, he was going to decorate cupcakes.

Mike closes his eyes, and time continues passing as it always does; he counts to sixty, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and eighty, and it feels like a lot longer than three minutes.

Anyway.

The door opens without warning, and Doctor Irving sweeps into the room as though he has somewhere more important to be and an expression on his face as though he doesn’t.

Mike folds his arms across his chest and waits.

“So I hear this is the last we’ll be seeing of each other for awhile,” Irving says in that enthusiastic way of his, picking up a sphygmomanometer from a standing tray behind him and reaching for Mike’s arm as he steps closer.

As though he didn’t know. As though he wasn’t the one to order Mike’s release.

“Yep.”

Irving straps the cuff around Mike’s bicep and puts the earpieces of the stethoscope around his neck into his ears.

“You looking forward to it?”

Why bother?

“Yep.”

Irving holds the drum of the stethoscope under the cuff and nods to himself.

“So this is just a pretty basic checkup right now, so I can check some numbers against your baseline, and assuming everything comes out okay…you’ll be all good to go.” He slides the drum back out and takes a pen from his pocket, holding it up in front of Mike’s face. “Follow the pen with your eyes, don’t move your head, alright? Keep your head perfectly still.”

“Mm.”

Mike slides his eyes back and forth, and Irving nods.

“Good.”

Unstrapping the cuff, he sighs as though he’s just accomplished something difficult; Mike wonders what it was.

“Have you been experiencing any unusual symptoms since the last time we talked? Anything you want to ask me about, anything making you nervous?”

Mike drops his head back against the wall. The vertigo’s been getting better, actually, a little bit at a time, and it’s been at least a few days since his last headache. And his clavicle doesn’t really hurt anymore, unless he moves it wrong, so that’s good.

“I don’t think so.”

This is all pretty anticlimactic, isn’t it?

“Great.” Irving smiles at him. “So you’re going to have to take an anticonvulsant for about a week, just as a preventative measure; we’re not too worried about anything, but, better safe than sorry, right?” He kind of laughs, like it’s supposed to be funny, and Mike smiles a little.

“Now, you’ve finished all your therapy here,” Irving goes on, “but you and I still need to have checkups every once in awhile, about once a year, unless something comes up and you need to see me earlier than that.”

“Once a year for the rest of my life?” Mike asks dryly.

Irving smiles like he’s heard it all before. “Once a year for the first three years or so, two or three years, then we’ll see. We can adjust.”

Mike nods. Sounds fair.

“Do you know where you’re going to be living when you get out of here?”

Do none of these people talk to each other?

“I’m gonna be living with Harvey,” he says. “He’s letting me stay in his guest room.”

Irving smiles as though something about this is supposed to be funny. “Great,” he says with obvious relief. “That’s great. And if it’s alright with you, I’ll talk to him about the phenytoin, just to be safe, and—would you like to give us permission to give Harvey your medical records, or do you want to take them yourself?”

Mike shrugs and picks at the paper underneath him with his index finger. “Harvey can have them.”

“Okay, then I’ve just gotta get a form for you to sign, but that’s fine.” Irving smiles again. “Do you have any questions?”

Mike looks at the floor.

“What’s phenytoin?”

“Phenytoin?” Irving arches his eyebrows. “The anticonvulsant, you’ll have to take it once a day for a week. Do you want me to write this down?”

Mike shakes his head indifferently.

“No thanks.”

After everything that’s happened…this is the end of it?

Well. That’s alright.

“Do you know how to get back to your room?” Irving asks. “Just wait here,” he answers himself, “I’ll get Darlene back here to go with you.”

Doctor Irving leaves, and it isn’t long before Darlene comes back with a bright smile on her cheerful face.

Mike slides off the table and follows her down the hall.

To be fair, it could’ve been a lot worse.

\---

The morning dawns ugly and grey, and Mike stays in bed as long as he’s able. Breakfast will be here soon, watery oatmeal or a plastic bowl of Cheerios and a little paper carton of milk. Maybe a juice box. Water without ice.

The minutes tick by, one after another. Mike listens to the shuffle of shoes out in the hall, the opening and closing of doors. The muttering of patients and nurses, the inquiring voices of lost visitors.

The minutes tick by, and the door clicks open.

“Mike?”

Mike scrambles to sit up, resting his arms on his knees; so, no breakfast. Fine. He might as well already be gone.

“Morning.”

Harvey steps carefully around the curtain, smiling wide the moment Mike comes into view, the moment he assures himself that everything is okay for now. Everything is going according to plan.

“Hey, rookie. You ready to get out of here?”

Mike twists his fingers together and looks down at the bedsheets.

“I feel like I’m forgetting something.”

The smile on Harvey’s face freezes for a second before it falls away, and Mike shrugs and wishes he’d chosen his words a little more carefully.

“It’s fine,” he says dismissively. “If it’s important, I’m sure I’ll remember it later.”

Harvey smiles again. This one doesn’t last quite as long, but that’s okay; today is a weird day for all of them.

“I talked to Doctor Irving,” he says. “He said the hospital would mail me all your files ‘as soon as possible,’ and, you know. Who knows when that’ll be. I’ll keep on them, though,” he assures him, “I’ll take care of it.”

Mike smiles. “Thanks.”

“Mm.”

Out the window, wispy clouds drift along the ugly grey sky, and Mike’s mouth feels a little dry.

“I talked to Doctor Andrews,” Harvey says as though he’s compensating for something. “She said she’d be open to still seeing you after you move into the outpatient program, if you were interested; might not be a bad idea.”

Mike clears his throat. “Cool.”

“Just think about it.”

Mike nods, and Harvey folds his hands behind his back.

Maybe they should be counting down the hours, but Mike doesn’t really know what they’re waiting for.

“I’m sorry this isn’t easier,” Harvey says suddenly, grimacing as though he should’ve known better, he should’ve seen all of this coming and headed it off at the pass. “When they were moving you from Stony Brook, everything moved so fast, everyone just— They all had their jobs and they knew how to do them, they knew the protocol and everything and as soon as I gave them their money, as soon as the ambulance pulled up, they were on the road, they knew where they were going and how to get there, and who was allowed to go where, and who was allowed to do what, and…”

He drops his hands dispiritedly.

“I’m sorry.”

Harvey doesn’t need Mike to blame him for any of this; he’s doing just fine on his own, thank you very much.

“This place sucks,” Mike says, because it feels sort of nice, sort of lighthearted to put the burden somewhere else for a change. Except that Harvey gets a panicked look in his eye like that’s just made everything ten times worse, and Mike raises his hand and shakes his head in jerky little movements.

“No,” he blusters, “no, I was kidding. Everyone’s great, the doctors are—great, I just… I mean…” He shrugs weakly. “It’s a hospital.”

Somehow rushing and pausing at the same time, Harvey steps forward, raising and lowering his hands, and Mike presses his lips together and looks up imploringly.

“Is there anything I can get you?” Harvey begs.

Mike shakes his head and makes an effort to smile.

“I’m fine.”

Nodding uncomfortably, Harvey turns to look behind him into the hall full of people, patients and nurses and visitors, none of them there for Mike.

“They weren’t really clear on how we’re supposed to do this,” he mutters agitatedly, sliding his feet across the floor. “We can’t just—leave…”

Mike pulls his knees to his chest and clasps his hands around them; Harvey scowls and shakes his head.

“I’ll find someone,” he decides. “Do you have anything here you want to take with you?”

Mike looks at the phone on the bedside table, at the business card stuck underneath it that he keeps within reach at all times even though he really doesn’t need to.

Anything at all?

“I don’t think so,” he says. “This doesn’t seem like the kind of place that’d be cool with me stealing the soaps on my way out.”

Harvey smirks. “I bet you could sneak one of the robes into your carry-on.”

“That piece of shit wouldn’t even make it through the first wash cycle.”

“You’re telling me it wouldn’t be worth it to feel that cool breeze on your ass that one time?”

Mike snorts a laugh into his fist, and Harvey grins.

“When we get back to my place, you’ll have the guest room to yourself,” he says as he sits on the edge of the bed. “Guest room, closet, en suite, and I got some of your clothes and stuff from your old place, from Rachel, and…if there’s anything you need that you don’t have, anything I should’ve gotten you that I didn’t, you just let me know and I’ll see what I can do.”

Mike smiles softly. “Thanks, Harvey.”

“And I talked to my super about getting you access to the gym and the pool,” he goes on, “so you’ll be able to use the facilities anytime; it’s not a damn frat house, so you wanna try not to use the treadmill at midnight, but it’s open twenty-four seven, whenever you need it. Did you talk to Jason about working out? More physical therapy or anything?”

Physical therapy, once a day, every day. Ten or eleven o’clock, or something like that. He’s gotten stronger, and he and Jason spend a lot of time working on the vertigo.

“Yeah,” Mike says a little thickly. “It’s fine.”

“Did he say what you should be doing?” Harvey presses. “Did he give you any names of other therapists, or other places you should be looking? I’ll talk to him, I’ll see if someone can give me his number.”

Out the door, turn right, down the hall. He knows how to navigate this place, and someone always comes by to take him to places unfamiliar.

“Anyway when you’re at the apartment, you can do pretty much whatever you want,” Harvey says. “There’s food in the fridge, but you can order anything you want that isn’t there, I’ll make sure you have all the numbers you need and you can just charge it to my card.”

You’d better be ready to make all these grown-up decisions, Michael.

_I want to get better._

And is this what that looks like, huh? Pretty great, isn’t it? Just what you wanted, just what you’ve been fighting for this entire time.

“Mike?”

It’ll be different, won’t it? It’ll be a lot, won’t it? It’ll be fantastic, it’ll be amazing, it’ll be so much.

Mike presses his lips together and narrows his eyes. This is a good thing. A good thing. It is. Really.

Harvey stands suddenly, reaching out to set his hand on Mike’s shoulder and stopping just short of touching.

“Mike, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

Shaking his head, Mike tries to pull the blankets up to his chest without being too conspicuous.

Harvey looks uncertainly toward the door, and Mike closes his eyes tight as his face heats up. Hang on, he’ll be fine in a minute. He will. Really.

The bed dips as Harvey sits beside him, then a little more as he puts his arm around Mike’s shoulders.

Just hang on.

“It’ll be alright,” he murmurs. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

Mike balls up his fists and presses his forehead to his knees, and Harvey wrap his arms around him and holds him close. A violent sob wracks his back, and Mike leans into Harvey’s chest as his tears soak into the blanket clasped under his chin.

Harvey rubs his hand over Mike’s shoulder and holds him close.

“You’re good,” he says softly. Mike sobs again, and Harvey slides one of his hands up to cradle his head.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Mike sits on his bed, holding the blanket up to his face and pressing himself into Harvey’s embrace, and cries, and cries, about what, he doesn’t even know, it doesn’t even matter. About nothing, about everything. Everything that isn’t, and everything that is.

Harvey holds him close, and waits.

Finally, after a long time, or just a little while, Mike’s cries begin to quiet, his trembling less severe, and Harvey drops his hand from his head down to his neck, and around his back.

“Alright.”

Mike sniffles.

“Here,” Harvey says, reaching back to grab a box of tissues. “You okay?”

Mike blows his nose and rubs the heel of his palm against his eye.

“I’m fine,” he says, sniffling again, and Harvey smiles.

“Okay.”

Mike smiles, just a bit.

He is, really.

“So,” Harvey says, squeezing Mike’s shoulder gently, “you ready to get out of here?”

Mike sniffles again and reaches for another tissue.

“Yeah.”

Grinning, Harvey claps his hand down on Mike’s shoulder and stands, and Mike blinks up at him, at the gritty sky out the window at his back, and clutches the dirty tissue in his fist.

“What day is it?”

Harvey’s smile dims, and Mike has the fleeting thought that he must be remembering something meaningful.

“Friday,” he says softly.

Friday.

Harvey is supposed to be at the office right now. Harvey has a lot of cases, and his work is piling up, and he has other responsibilities besides Mike.

Mike looks at the phone on the bedside table, at the business card stuck underneath it that he keeps within reach at all times.

Harvey is doing his best to take care of himself, and he’s spending time with Mike because he wants to.

And everything is just fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Phenytoin](https://reference.medscape.com/drug/dilantin-phenytek-phenytoin-343019) is an anticonvulsant commonly used to treat TBI patients; it is intended for use with patients who have experienced post-traumatic seizure activity, although, as in Mike’s case, it can also be used as a preventative measure (i.e., prophylaxis).


End file.
